The NSA wiretapping story has to this point been debated primarily in terms of its legality. I agree. If the President flaunts the law then he ought to get in a lot of trouble. But another big question is would it even work?
In response to outrage over this program the wingers are invariably responding: we need these wiretaps so that we can catch Al Qaeda. In other words they claim that this program is necessary to keep America safe. If that is their only argument, they are in trouble.
Let's put aside the question of whether or not the NSA can track millions of phone calls and build a national database. Let's ask, will it keep us safe?
I think we all know the answer. Innately we all know that this won't even work. If it were going to work we probably wouldn't be this outraged and we'd want to find a compromise to make it legal.
Think for a second about the sheer magnitude of the calls that are placed on any given day in the United States. I have looked for and have not found an explanation as to how such a comprehensive program will successfully snare terrorist communications. tomster here at dKos has taken a stab at it. But in my mind it falls short. I still can't get past the idea that they may be spreading themselves too thin by doing this. I mean before 9/11 they intercepted calls, but didn't have enough translators. We can assume that many of the domestic calls that they would be interested in would need translation as well. Also the intelligence community already knew that a number of the 9/11 terrorists were bad guys, they just did a bad job of tracking them down - probably because...say it together...THEY WERE STRETCHED TOO THIN.
This will produce a lot of dead-end leads. More in-depth techie-analysis can be found here and here. They reach essentially the same conclusion.
We need to deflate their claim that this will keep us safe. It is a wreckless program that will not work, will waste money, will distract the talented analysts at the NSA, will waste resources throughout the intelligence community by chasing down bad leads, and needlessly invade people's privacy. In other words this is a lose-lose-lose-lose-lose scenario. And I haven't even talked about it's legality...