they would have been able to stop Mohammed Merah earlier, and prevent the deaths of seven innocent French men women and children.
I'm not kidding. This is what I just read in the NYTimes this morning:
Mr. Merah clearly slipped through the French net, which relies heavily on human intelligence and judgment. The French are asking why, and whether he might have been more easily identified by the more automated — and expensive — American-style reliance on computerized monitoring of phone calls and the Internet. That question is unanswerable, of course. But the differences between the two countries and their methods are considerable.
This is exactly what Thomas Drake was so concerned about and that got him into a major legal quagmire with the Federal Government. The Feds dropped their case against Drake last year, but only because they didn't want to reveal details about its data mining operation, and so they withdrew not the charges but their evidence!
The Federal government is at this point guarding what is pretty much an open secret.
However, it should be pretty clear to even the most casually informed observer that we know exactly what's going on.