Upside Down, and Inside Out

Listening to several experts on the news - legal, constitutional, privacy and big brother type questions aside - most make one seemingly consistent point about the massive NSA phone record database. In essence, they suggest, stripped of all identifying information and content, they can help to recognize patterns between known terrorist cell related elements, and unknowns.

This seems reasonable enough, except for one thing. Wouldn't it make more sense to work from known information, and progress to the related but unknown, then to track all unknown information to look for the known? An excellent analysis among experts on the subject.

It has also been argued that such a phone data base would possibly have prevented 9/11, because "we knew who some of these guys were." This argument is disturbing. If we knew who these guys were, why weren't we tracking this information back outwards to find connections, instead of lamenting that we did not have a data base of several billion calls at that point to sift through so that we could find them. The record is also clear that we did not utilize the information that we had, and that if more attention was paid to the issue in light of the known facts at the time, a different and much clearer picture might have emerged.