Will’s Words of Wisdom

George Will on Sunday offered his analysis on the NSA’s widespread surveillance of Internet and phone data, providing the cases for and against the agency’s program. 

“We are threatened by needles in a haystack — very few needles in a very large haystack,” he said. “We’re threatened not by a nation but by a network, and it is the nature of a terrorist network to be invisible until made visible, hence when there’s an attack, we talk about who didn’t connect the dots.” Will argued that the data being gathered by the NSA and the sophisticated algorithms the agency is applying to it may allow national-security analysts to connect the dots before terrorist acts occur. 

On the flip side, he said, “We’re using technologies of information gathering . . . that are terribly important but terribly invasive, and they require reposing extraordinary trust in the executive branch of government, which some of us think it has recently forfeited.”