So I saw some of the coverage of the terror raid on CNN this morning and the press conference by Gonzales and the head of the FBI. A reporter asked a key question, did the NSA spying help? While not admitting the existence of such a program the director made it pretty clear that this group was discovered using pretty standard police work, namely a cooperating informant.

Now, with all these stories about wiretapping, police using pretexting "data brokers" (aka fraudsters) to obtain phone records, and now the NYT with reporting the government has been sifting through our bank records we have to wonder, beyond being illegal and violations of our civil rights, would any of these methods even be effective? Large scale screens will turn up more false positives that waste the time of the police and FBI, and this problem has been reported again and again. Not to mention the pain in the ass being on a no-fly list entails for a law-abiding citizen, just because you do something odd like pay off your credit cards in a lump sum.

Now we have homegrown terrorists being uncovered by what sounds like standard policing techniques and a willingness of average American citizens to be vigilant and patriotic. Is all the civil rights violations worth what probably amounts to mounds of worthless data?

Maybe it's my scientific background, but I'm very suspicious of big screens. They tend to turn up more junk than directed study, and the junk increases exponentially with the size of the data set. I really doubt attempts to enter a huge set of Americans into some database for a computer to analyze will generate anything but a shitload of false leads, when what we really need is directed police work and citizen vigilance. It's similar to profiling for terrorists in the airport in terms of doing what's effective, not necessarily obvious. If you look at the picture of these guys, nothing would necessarily say middle east terrorist. And as ask the pilot has noted a majority of the plane-based terror attacks or attempts would have been missed with screening based on profiling. After all, if they know what your bias is, then they can anticipate and bypass your security more easily, not less.

More details of the investigation will surely emerge. Right now it sounds like this was just a crazy cult, from the so-called "seas of David" that was uncovered when one of the members decided he wasn't in for Jihad against his own country. And I'm glad to see that it was just good old police work that seems to have uncovered it.