Sorry – I forgot to highlight last week’s excellent analysis by federal circuit judge Richard A. Posner:
. . .there has been little discussion of the program’s concrete value as a counterterrorism measure or of the inroads it has or has not made on liberty or privacy.
Not only are these questions more important to most people than the legal questions; they are fundamental to those questions. Lawyers who are busily debating legality without first trying to assess the consequences of the program have put the cart before the horse. Law in the United States is not a Platonic abstraction but a flexible tool of social policy. In analyzing all but the simplest legal questions, one is well advised to begin by asking what social policies are at stake. Suppose the NSA program is vital to the nation’s defense, and its impingements on civil liberties are slight. . .
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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