Thank You for Data-Mining

[Commentary] Well, another day, another Washington furor. This one is over a National Security Agency phone data monitoring program, but unlike the other White House scandals there seems to be little here that is scandalous. The existence of the program was exposed years ago and such surveillance is a core part of the war on terror. The outrage this time seems to stem from the fact that the government is widely collecting call records, not merely those associated with a particular suspect or group. But this fear misunderstands how the program works. From what we know, the NSA runs algorithms over the call log database, searching for suspicious patterns over time. The effectiveness of data-mining is inversely proportional to the size of the sample, so the NSA must sweep broadly to learn what is normal and refine the deviations. The real danger from this leak is the potential political overreaction.