Briefs

By Morton Kondracke.

"I think it's important to point out," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told me in an interview, "that there's no evidence that this is a program designed to achieve political ends or do something nefarious."

He was talking about the National Security Agency's warrantless "domestic spying" program, and I couldn't agree with him more. Despite the alarms sounded by the American Civil Liberties Union, former Vice President Al Gore and various members of Congress, "there hasn't even been a hint" that the program is targeted at domestic dissidents or innocent bystanders, Chertoff said. It's designed to find and stop terrorists.

"If you go back to the post-Sept. 11 analyses and the 9/11 Commission, the whole message was that we were inadequately sensitive to the need to identify the dots and connect them," he said.

"Now, what we're trying to do is gather as many dots as we can, figure out which are the ones that have to be connected and we're getting them connected," he said.

While refusing to discuss how the highly classified program works, Chertoff made it pretty clear that it involves "data-mining" - collecting vast amounts of international communications data, running it through computers to spot key words and honing in on potential terrorists. rest of the story.

For another point of view, see

Data-mining doubts, Washington Times, By Bruce Fein.