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Civil liberties are broadly defined as the series of freedoms that protect the smallest minority, the individual, from arbitrary interference by the government. Without question, the mandate of the National Security Agency and Central Security Services is to interfere with the goings on of individual citizens of the United States presumably to some noble end.

Setting their ends or goals aside, be they lofty or nefarious, we must look only at their methods to discover that, yes, both of these agencies are harming civil liberties in the United States.

Through the advent of computers, speech recognition, nearly unlimited data storage capabilities and the like, it becomes patently obvious that these agencies have the opportunity to conduct so called "data mining" operations. According to USA Today* a single terabyte (1000 GB) would hold 274 days worth of everything an individual comes into contact with. Pictures, video, audio, magazines read, etc. A quick search of a consumer computer hardware site such as www.newegg.com gives us a retail price of $350.00 per terabyte. The Los Angeles Times recently revealed that the United States spends $43.5 billion on intelligence gathering each year.* Clearly, this number includes salaries, foreign and domestic intelligence gathering, and countless other programs, but that is roughly $261 billion dollars since 9/11. So, if merely a single year's budget was spent, 1/6th the total since 9/11, that would allow the government to digitally capture the entire lives, everything about them including phone calls, emails, every page read and every conversation had, of more than 124 million Americans for nearly 10 months without having to overwrite a single file. That's nearly half the population including children as young as infants. Sufficient to say, we have the technology, but does the desire to infringe on these liberties exist?

A commercial fisherman does not throw a single line into the water to catch a single tuna. Rather, they trawl the ocean with nets, catching anything and everything in their path. Be it tuna, the intended target, or dolphin, the net itself is indiscriminate. So, we see that from this simple analogy that technology is sufficient to cast a digital net over the entire society in order catch as many intended targets as possible. It is simply more efficient than a single line in the water.

Now, that the efficient methodology is established, we turn our eyes to the motivation. Since the failures of all the

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