It’s making the news now and really should have come as no surprise if you have been following the news. It’s a reducto ad absurdum of the Administration’s “creative†interpretation of the Constitution.
If you parse the up-to-date denials and spin, you will see they’re not denying it. The only claim is that the profiles are anonymous. Their interpretation of the law seems to be as long as its not tied to your social security number, no warrant is needed and the 4th is not violated. (There is this separation in their minds between “unreasonable search and seisure†and “probable cause†along the lines of “these are terrorists, this is war, it is not unreasonable to search these records without warrants in times of war.)
I’m not interesting in talking about the legality of that. Instead I want to think about two things: 1) Why the outrage now? 2) Even if you take the most restrictive definition of what that database does, how useful is it?
