It's the folks in charge

I get - I really do - where the likes of Andrew C. McCarthy an John Bolton are coming from on the subject of NSA surveillance.  I'm quite certain it's foiled a number of terrorist plots, some of them possibly apocalyptic in potential magnitude.

But consider George Will's argument.  The leviathan state is infested with this type of operative:

The case for the National Security Agency’s gathering of metadata is: America is threatened not by a nation but by a network, dispersed and largely invisible until made visible by connecting dots. The network cannot help but leave, as we all do daily, a digital trail of cellphone, credit card and Internet uses. The dots are in such data; algorithms connect them. The technological gathering of 300 billion bits of data is less menacing than the gathering of 300 by bureaucrats. Mass gatherings by the executive branch twice receive judicial scrutiny, once concerning phone and Internet usages, another concerning the content of messages.

The case against the NSA is: Lois Lerner and others of her ilk.

If there were some way to keep rabid FHers away from the opportunity to misuse the power that comes with all that data, I'd be a lot more comfortable with the government having it.