Wiretapping: The Competence Issue

Michael Hirsh makes a compelling argument in the online edition of Newsweek that the most important issue in the debate over warrantless wiretapping is not legality, but competence:

After four and a half years, our intelligence and national-security apparatus still hasn’t learned how to track terrorists, and the Bush administration has put forward little more than cosmetic reforms. The legal controversy over the NSA surveillance program has obscured an intelligence issue that is at least as important to the nation’s future: sheer competence. Do we have any idea what we’re doing? One reason the NSA is listening in on so many domestic conversations fruitlesslyâ€"few of the thousands of tips panned out, according to The Washington Post -- is that the agency barely has a clue as to who, or what, it is supposed to be monitoring.

It's one thing to trade some degree of civil liberties for safety. It's another to make the trade without knowing how much, if any, additional safety you're actually getting.