Digby: Good For Only One Thing

The Republicans (and some Democrats) have made a fetish of describing the warrantless surveillance programs as necessary to catch terrorists before they hit. They can't tell us anything about what these programs actually do --- it's quite clear there is more to it than "listening in on the phone calls of terrorists." One of the things that most people agree upon is that it includes some sort of datamining and I suspect that when this is explained to some of these congressmen and Senators, their eyes glaze over in the same way they do when anybody talks about the intertubes. They are, to be kind, very easily hoodwinked with technobabble.