The Latest Non-Story from the Non Story Agency

The NSA -- National Security Agency -- used to be referred to by Beltway wags as the "No Such Agency," because its very existence was secret. No longer. So I am now going to start a new trend of referring to the NSA as the "Non Story Agency," because it appears that the media is fixated on breathlessly reporting as news things about the NSA that aren't remotely newsworthy, other than the fact that someone has committed treason in revealing them.

The latest non-story that has blown up into a media hissy fit is the report that the NSA receives records of telephone calls made in the U.S. from three major phone companies, then "data mines" those enormous sets of information for patterns of calling that could link to al Qaida. Here is the money quote from the Washington Post story about the program:

Although there is no evidence that the harvesting programs have been involved in illegal activity or have been abused to reach into the lives of innocent Americans, their sheer scope, the number of "transactions" being tracked, raises questions as to whether an all-seeing domestic surveillance system isn't slowly being established, one that in just a few years time will be able to reveal the interactions of any targeted individual in near real time.

The italics are mine, and the italics are all that really matters, because the italicized qualification that says that there is "no evidence" of any illegality or abuse related to the program means, well, that there's no evidence. Where I practice law, "no evidence" means no evidence, nada, zippo, case is over, go home. What it should mean to a newspaper editor is "where's the story, here, you lame-o, how about going out and finding some real news!"

What it apparently means nowadays, however, is that "although there is nothing to report that news organizations in the past would have judged to be 'news,' we are going to report on paranoid suspicions of things that might happen sometime in the future, because we don't like the President and want the Democrats to win Congress in 2006 so they can impeach him and get back at the GOP for Monica Lewinsky."

This NSA program is entirely legal -- see the 1979 Supreme Court case of Smith v. Maryland, where the Court held that information about telephone numbers called is essentially billing information, which the customer has no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding, and which, in fact, belongs to the phone companies, not to the customer. However, it is (was) classified, so the real story, if the WaPo wanted to go this route, would be to ask who committed a very serious crime that threatens our national security by revealing the existence of a classified NSA program. Fat chance.