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Posted by Kevin Hartnett  June 12, 2013 11:36 AM  E-mail this
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your article  Revelations last week that the National Security
Agency has been conducting a top-secret digital surveillance
program called PRISM spawned widespread outrage. They also
prompted a secondary set of questions: Is blindly collecting
gargantuan amounts of Internet data even an effective way to nab
terrorists?  In the days since PRISM became public, a couple of
blog posts have been published that come to innovative but
opposite conclusions on that question.  The first, by Duke
sociologist Kieran Healy, argues that PRISM is more dangerously
invasive than the government has allowed. Healy takes aim at the
claim that there's no great privacy intrusion when the
government merely collects metadata- records of who called whom
when- but doesn't actively eavesdrop on conversations. To make
this point, Healy takes the entertain