I've been thinking alot about the government's data mining program. As some have argued, it takes public information and discovers suspicious correlations. These are then investigated, but no wiretaps are done unless there is probable cause.
This is all well and good, except if you combine two features:
1) There will be a lot of false positives. If the error rate for finding "suspicious correlations" is 1%, meaning that out of 100 "hits", only 1 person is truly innocent, then 2,000,000 Americans will be picked out as suspicious. (I am assuming that the base number for cell phone users is 200,000,000)
(tip of the hat to Zachary Ernst for reminding me of this)
2) As others have argued persuasively, for example here, we are all criminals. We break federal regulations all the time, mostly through ignorance.
Combining 1 & 2, we can come to the conclusion that the data mining program has the capabilities of being very intrusive to many people we'd argue shouldn't be the focus of government suspicion. If I'm one of the false positives, it won't take long for an investigator to find evidence of my wrongdoing, which will provide enough evidence for a wiretap.
