If you are like me, you know such spying is both dangerous, and contrary to American values, but you lack a coherent understanding of the technology that makes it possible.  

You know statements such as this one by Bush on  December 17th, 2005  

"Yesterday the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk."

are a lie.  But it is hard for you to explain exactly why.  

Fortunately, a fascinating article by Stephen E. Fienberg, in the May edition of Statistical Science offers an excellent roadmap to discussing this issue.

Fiengold (and yes that is the correct spelling of his name) in his review article "Privacy and Confidentiality in an E-Commerce World" (2006, Statistical Science 21:2, 143-152.  No link) explains what electronic surveillance really is and the challenges to privacy it creates.  With a little extrapolation, this explanation offers a framework (outlined below) for Progressives to use to discuss electronic surveillance in general, and our specific concerns about the Bush administrations uses of it.  

Good Surveillance and Bad Surveillance Data mining in and of itself is not a terrible thing and in fact offers many benefits to both consumers, law enforcement, and can even surprisingly forward progressive values.  For example, CHOICEpoint, a massive consumer information and data mining firm, through its CHOICEpoint CARES program has used data minding to locate criminally abducted children, and prove the innocence, of wrongly convicted inmates.  Data mining can indeed be used to find "bad guys", and more so its use for those purposes is very similar to the types of surveillance Americans has long tolerated by law enforcement agencies.

Good surveillance can be thought of as, retrodiction, which essentially means that large comprehensive databases are used to locate, and in some cases monitor known terrorists or criminals.  What is more, such a use of data mining to monitor known suspects fits nicely withing our existing (i.e. Pre-Bush) understanding of what should be allowable under the law, and can easily be brought under judicial review using a warrant system.  

Because retrodictive data mining targets a finite list of known suspects, the scope of the surveillance can be monitored through legal mechanisms.  No doubt, mistakes will be made and people may be wrongly monitored, but such a situation would not differ in any meaningful way from mistakes made when the police ask for a telephone wire tap of someone who turns out to be the wrong suspect.

Progressives can with a clean conscience and without fear of betraying American Civil Liberties advocate for the a system of retrodictive surveillance of known suspects that brings such surveillance under the review of judges and modifies existing legal codes to match the realities of the internet age.  We want a safe country so we should push for electronic surveillance to be integrated, under judicial supervision, into the law-enforcement policies of the agencies charged with protecting us.  More so, because retrodictive surveillance has the possibility of being perfect (in that no false suspects are ever monitored), mistakes and abuses of such a system can be quantified and thus tracked and managed.

Bad Surveillance is what can be considered the predictive use of data surveillance to profile certain unknown individuals and classify them possible criminals and terrorists.  Definitionally, such predictive surveillance can never be perfect, and the number of errors it creates will increase with the number of people it is applied to and the number of people who are employed to monitor its results.  

Bad surveillance is everything you would fear it might be.  It consists of using major consumer, government, and commercial data bases to profile individuals and then categorize those individuals into three groups; certain criminals or terrorists (I suppose those with active files on them), suspect criminals or terrorists, and non-suspects.  Because the predictive model can never be perfect, the model will always result in a large number of both "false positives" (those suspected of terrorism who actually have no intention of terrorizing) as well as false negatives (those who intend to terrorize, but are predicted to be of no risk.  This creates two major problems:

1.  Resources are wasted monitoring false positives that should be devoted to uncovering false negatives through other means such as traditional detective work and traditional spying; and

2. The need to respond and react to "suspect criminals or terrorism" requires individual investigators to use their own discretion to sort through which "leads" to pursue and which not to.  

Point two is key, because of the large number of potential leads that are created, individual investigators must chose which leads to pursue.  Electronic surveillance has an air of scientific credibility, but in fact this feature makes it prone to the same human error as all secret police forces throughout history.  Ultimately, an individuals detective must chose to pursue "suspects", and this discretion can be abused deliberately, or could be influenced by the investigators personal biases.  It is important for Progressives that the system is open to individual abuse regardless of the intentions of the Nation's leaders.  A perhaps more likely consequence of electronic surveillance than a state-sponsored system to monitor and punish political dissidents, would be the exploitation of the system by individual investigators for the purposes of blackmail or revenge.  

The key distinction between good surveillance and bad.  Good surveillance monitors known criminal suspects and is put in place after requesting a warrant or other form of judicial review.  Bad surveillance attempts to predict who will become a terrorist in the future and inherently by its very nature creates error that targets innocents as well as the guilty.

The information is wrong The final thing American's should understand about electronic data surveillance is that the data is likely to be wrong.  I can't tell you how many times I have heard from people that they were not concerned about government surveillance because the government has no interest in them, and furthermore they have nothing to hide.  

These American's should be confronted with the grim facts that

1.  The US Electronic surveillance systems almost certainly contain data on them,
   
2.  Given the large volume of records that are being processed, the data about them is likely to contain several inaccuracies - in other words contain wrong information,
   
3. That they will never have the opportunity to know what information is being collected about them, or the chance to correct any inaccuracies,
   
4.  With Republicans in power these files are increasingly and at an accelerating rate being linked to federal national security databases such as those used by the NSA, and finally
   
5.  Abuse of the system, or errors in the data, could result in severe personal consequences for them given the current use of extrajudicial detention by the White House.

That's lot of information.  In a nutshell, what should our message be.

1.  Progressives strongly support the use of electronic surveillance to monitor the activities of known suspects under the authority of the courts.  We want to work to modernize laws to make such surveillance as easy and effective for law enforcement officers as possible.

2.  However, we strongly oppose the use of electronic surveillance to attempt to predict future criminals or terrorists.  We believe such systems are ineffective and wasteful of security resources and are inherently by their very nature plagued by errors and open to abuse, but systematic and personal.  Abuse of electronic surveillance by individual investigators to punish ex-lovers, or social enemies is a real and unavoidable consequence of such a system. To put in simple language, if you don't want your local homeland security officer monitoring your girlfriend, then you're on our side.

3.  Electronic surveillance, despite is pseudo-scientific clothing, does not eliminate human judgement. Bad surveillance creates conditions where individuals must use their own discretion to sort through suspects, and because these individuals are human they may abuse their discretion or error in systematic ways according to their own racial biases or preferences.    

4.  The Databases from which the information is drawn are inherently flawed and full of error.  Therefore, even those with "nothing to hide" may potentially become entangled in a legal situation with the Department of Homeland Security or the Transportation Security Administration through no fault of their own, simply due to a clerks keystroke error.

5.  Bad surveillance is like identity theft, once let out of the bottle it will become a constant nagging anxiety and no one will ever be able to fully protect themselves from it.  

(Cross-posted at the Daily Kos)