The confidential sources who revealed the program to USA Today say it only collects telephone numbers, not names, addresses, Social Security numbers or other data. But it is easy to find a person’s identity from a phone number, and it would be amazing if that hadn’t been done.

There are several problems here. The first is that it is probably illegal for the National Security Agency, which was formed to monitor overseas communications, to collect this data in secret. In addition to the NSA charter, the Communications Act, first passed in 1934, has privacy provisions that seem fairly clear: Phone companies are not allowed to share data about customer calling habits unless presented with a warrant, and the fines can be stiff.

Second is that the program is probably useless when it comes to detecting terrorism. Jim Hall, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, who serves on a Department of Homeland Security data privacy committee and has discussed the issue with numerous experts, told us that data mining can be useful when looking for common patterns, like how a thief might use a stolen credit card. But terrorist acts are uncommon. One is more likely to get 99 percent false positives, which will lead to a waste of investigative resources, than to prevent a terrorist attack through this method. ~The Orange County Register