The Government knows what's best for you.
Ugh just thinking of that sentiment gives me the creeps real bad. That's all I heard when I was a kid / teen ('80's for the curious). That's the party line no matter what party was up at bat.
If this stays, I thinks our world is over. Aw hell it was over in 1973, it's just taken it 40 years for the corpse to realize it.
Still, in a word, Bullshit! Even if they had this deep, massive, dynamic oh-so-easy-to-misuse body of information back in 2001, they wouldn't find the perps before the planes took off because they (NSA, FBI, USA) can't find their own asshole with two hands *and* a flashlight! (torch for our uk-ish readers).
And even that's irrelevant, really. If this stays, we've become a de-facto dictatorship with a rotating figurehead and lower cabinet, to present the illusion of movement at the top every n years. LIke said up there in the main thread, the 4th Amendment is dead, if this thing stays. And that's the paper-thin line that keeps us from being a police state, at least on paper it does.
Y'know, now I think of the third paragraph up there.. we became one a long time ago, didn't we -- a dictatorship with a rotating head.