Plame and Wilson: The NSA's metastasised intelligence-industrial complex is ripe for abuse

[thucythucy]

46. Has anybody come up with a reasonable solution

to all this?

"To date, there is no proof that the government has used this information to pursue and harass US citizens based on their political views. There are no J Edgar Hoover-like "enemy lists" … yet. But it is not so difficult to envision a scenario where any of us has a link, via a friend of a friend, to someone on the terrorist watchlist. What then? You may have no idea who this person is, but a supercomputer in Fort Meade (or, soon, at the Utah Data Center near Salt Lake City) will have made this connection. And then you could have some explaining to do to an over-zealous prosecutor."

The question I'd like to see answered, or at least posed in a way that doesn't preclude a reasonable discussion, is how do we protect people's Fourth Amendment rights at the same time we try to guarantee there are no future successful attacks on the scale of 9-11? Because should such an attack happen--and on a Democrat's watch--the "soft on terrorism" charge will haunt Democrats for decades, just as the "soft on communism" and "who lost China?" charges cost Democrats dearly in the 1950s,'60s, '70s and 80s.

If anyone could come up with a way forward, you would think it would be Wilson and Plame.

Eventually we'll have to work through the initial shock and outrage and come up with an actual strategy for dealing with the "intelligence-industrial complex." I'd love to see some discussion of how to make that happen.