MR. KOJO NNAMDIFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your neighborhood with the world. For most of us living in the DMV, the Washington, D.C. region, there are small but constant daily reminders of the post-9/11 world we're living in. In the metro, we're urged to see it, say it at the airports. The TSA can confiscate hand cream. On the trains, we submit to bomb-sniffing dogs. And sometimes, visiting landmarks just isn't worth the security hassle. And then, there are things we can't see.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIThe National Security Agency can monitor our phone calls, and surveillance cameras follow us in most public places. With all these watchful eyes looking for bad guys, you'd think we'd be able to catch them before they try downing planes with bombs in their underwear. But despite billions that have been spent on surveillance in the past 30 years, intelligence officials still have trouble connecting the dots in the vast data trove they have collected. So, why are we still on the defensive in detecting new threats? Is it money? Is it lack of technology? Bureaucratic hurdles? All of the above? Joining us to put all of these together is Shane Harris. He's senior writer for Washingtonian Magazine and author of the book "The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State." Shane, good to see you.

MR. SHANE HARRISThank you for having me.

NNAMDIShane, in September 1984, a suicide bomber plowed into the barracks of a Marine unit in Beirut, Lebanon. You draw parallels between that tragedy, the September 11 terrorist attacks and the more recent Christmas Day underwear bombing who was ultimately -- underwear bomber who was ultimately unsuccessful. What are the human and technological failings that tied these incidents so closely together?

HARRISOh, that's right. There really are parallels between all three of those events that you mentioned, and the baseline here is that in each of these catastrophes, when we go back in retrospect, we find that various elements of the intelligence community and sometimes the military as well had clues to the events that were about to transpire, but no one or no system had put all of those clues or those dots together, if you like, and connected them.

HARRISAnd I was doing research for the book, what I realized was that 9/11, which is sort of this event that has become, obviously, so familiar to all of us, as an example of failure to connect the dots, really was really a midpoint in this long story that began, I think, really in '83 with the Beirut attack. As a brief history, you had Marines in camps there on a peacekeeping mission. They're stationed at the international airport in Beirut, and there had been all kinds of various signals about car bombings in the city, about plots that were -- and the inception point maybe but were clearly targeting the Marines at the airport. None of this information was ever shared with the commanders at the base, so that they can fortify their defenses. There were also various clues coming in from the surveillance agencies about chatters, as we would call it now, from groups outside of Lebanon trying to plot terrorist attacks against the Marines as well. Those things were never moved up the chain and really were only discovered by the people who needed to know that information after the event. So very similar to what happened on 9/11, and it's become something of a recurring theme now.

NNAMDIYou say that the 2009 Christmas Day attempt by a Nigerian man to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight was actually a qualified success by our national surveillance web. What do you mean by that?

HARRISYeah, that's right. I think it's an important point. So in this event, in the months -- in the month or so leading up to this young man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who getting on an airplane with this bomb strapped inside his underpants, there were indications about an impending plot. We know, for instance, that his father walked into the U.S. embassy in Abuja in November and said to the staff there, "This is the name of my son. He's gone off to Yemen. I fear that he's become an Islamic radical. He may be trying to join up with al-Qaeda." That information was transmitted back to Washington. The younger Abdulmutallab's name was put in the database. The staff at the embassy did check for his name to see if it was in the State Department record.

HARRISThe National Security Agency, our eavesdropping agency, was picking up chatter from al-Qaeda in Yemen about an unnamed Nigerian who had perhaps been enlisted for a new plot. So people were watching the sort of centers of activity that they needed to be watching. The problem was that nobody above them was really putting it together. And, again, no person, no system in place to make those connections. The good news is that we have created after 9/11 a center -- a national counterterrorism center that is supposed to do that. And very quickly after the attempted bombing, which obviously failed, people in that center, I think, went to work very quickly, and we're able to see where the information breakdowns were and then to try and go and fill those gaps. So we're learning lessons from this much more quickly, even though we see -- we keep making the same kinds of mistakes.

NNAMDIOn a personal note about how interesting Washington is, I went to my doctor's office some time after that and found myself seated next to the aforementioned attempted bomber's father.

HARRISOh, really? It's a small world...

NNAMDIHe was a doctor...

HARRIS...isn't it?

NNAMDI...in Washington, D.C.

HARRISUh-huh. Yeah. Only in Washington.

NNAMDIThere are 28 data networks and 80 intelligence streams that our security agents sift through for clues about potential threats. Do any of these networks work together? And give us a sense of scale here because we did a show last week on -- or the week before on just who can get security clearances. And it turns out that there's a startling number of people who get security clearances. So when we're talking about 28 networks, 80 intelligence streams and how they work together, you're talking about, literally, thousands of people working -- trying to work all together in different agencies.

HARRISThat's right. I mean, the best way to describe this is to talk about maybe perhaps what the system is not. It's not like Google for counterterrorism. So when we talk about these 28 different networks and all these different data streams that are passing along the street kinds of reports, whether they're gathered from human spies or from reconnaissance drones or from eavesdropping, some of that is able to be combined. Some of that is working together. But it's happening, I think, really more in pockets.

HARRISSo to give you an idea of sometimes where this doesn't occur, there's information that the Homeland Security Department collects or retains that has to do with U.S. persons, people like me and you, people who are listening to the show, the kinds of things that TSA is collecting on travelers, not all of that information can always be shared with intelligence intercepts that are coming in that involved foreign targets. There are different rules governing how these two kinds of surveillance occur, and, I think, in the aggregate, we look at this and we say there's all these data, how come they can't put it all together? There are still some policy restrictions that keep them from doing that. There are also cultural and bureaucratic restrictions and impediments.

HARRISSome of these agencies jealously guard this information they collect, not just because in D.C., of course, information is power. It's a currency that we're all familiar with. But the sources and the methods these agencies are using, the individual informants they're collecting from, the wiretaps they set up, they're not always very excited to share that information widely because, as you said, lots of people have security clearances now. So there are more people involved looking at this information. From a lot of intelligence agencies' point of view, that's more opportunities for the information to leak out, to get into the hands of where it doesn't need to be. All these fiefdoms are set up to prevent these kinds of things from happening.

NNAMDIHow about the technological aspects of this? Is someone, somewhere working on the technology to make these disparate intelligence networks communicate with one another?

HARRISThey are, yes. I mean, a lot of this work is happening in the private sector, among contractors, no surprise. One of the people who's been very intimately involved in this for the past 30 years and still is, is the main character in my book, John Poindexter, who most people will remember for his role in the Iran-Contra affair in the '80s, and he had -- took a leading role in this sort of technological innovation after 9/11 when he came back to the Defense Department working on a program called Total Information Awareness. And he is one of these people who is out there now looking for the next greatest way of parsing data, of trying to take all of this information and look for the signals in the low noise and find the pattern.

NNAMDIBut you opened your book "The Watchers" with a chilling prologue about the secretive product -- project, whose demise ultimately reflected the kind of hurdles we're facing in gathering, analyzing and using intelligence data today. Tell us about Project Able Danger, and then you can connect that to Poindexter.

HARRISSure. So Able Danger was a program that was run by the Army, Special Operations Command, in the late '90s, early 2000. And it had a very fairly straightforward goal. The idea was to identify the key members of the al-Qaeda network, which back then was not widely known to Americans but had attacked our embassies in Africa, to find out who those members were and to, essentially, roll them up. And that is a nice way of saying either find them and capture them or kill them. And the Army wanted to do this, in part, by using information technology to go out and gather up all the intelligence that the government had in its databases about al-Qaida and their affiliates but also to go out and search this, at the time, very new and novel database of information called the World Wide Web. So, essentially, Able Danger -- where they get into this is using tools that we would look at now as, basically, search engines, to go out there and sort of mine the universe of data and see what connections they could make about al-Qaida, the kind of things that you and I would now expect to see frankly on a Wikipedia page, but at the time, it was quite novel. The effort seemed to be very successful, and that it came back with a lot of potential hits, a lot of indications of potential terrorist activity in the U.S. or connected to the U.S.

HARRISBut there was a problem. As these analysts were going out and searching these web pages and chat rooms, they were gathering up the information well-mixed in with the names of possible terrorist, and Osama bin Laden might be the names of perfectly ordinary people, just the natural byproduct of searching on the Web. The moment that went into a military intelligence database, the Army lawyers determined that the Army was collecting information on U.S. persons, domestic spying, in other words. So that program had to be quite rapidly shut down. And the opening, you see on the book that you allude to, is actually the key analyst on that program, sitting in front of his computer having received these orders from the lawyers and literally hitting the delete button as they erased all of these spreadsheets and maps and documents that they've compiled on al-Qaida over the previous few months.

NNAMDIWas all of the information collection on that Able Danger project lost completely? What are the remnants of the project today? I guess that can bring us to John Poindexter.

HARRISSure. So the work product, if you like, the material was destroyed. And there are some people who've come forward and brought forth reproductions of things that were made during the Able Danger period. But as far as I could have ever find, they destroyed everything. Now where this connects to what John Poindexter was doing is the actual facility, or this Able Danger program operated out of, which has a rather catchy name, the Information Dominance Center, which was down at Fort Belvoir here in the Washington area was this very sophisticated room basically, a technological nerve center that allowed all these technologies to work together and to do this kind of data mining. When John Poindexter came back to the Pentagon after 9/11 at the research agency for the Defense Department, he based a lot of his research out of that same center. So there's sort of this intellectual pedigree, if you like, that carried forward. And, of course, he was doing very many of the same things that Able Danger was. How can we go out, search the available pools of information, gather together, find these clues and map out the threat? It was -- he just sort of picked up where they left off in a lot of ways.

NNAMDIWe're talking with Shane Harris. His book is called "The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State." He is a senior writer for Washingtonian Magazine. We're inviting your phone calls at 800-433-8850. Do you have confidence in the government's ability to thwart another terrorist attack? 800-433-8850. Or do you feel like your private information is really private? You can go to our website to join the conversation, kojoshow.org. Or you can send us an e-mail to kojo@wamu.org, a tweet, @kojoshow. Whatever happened to total information awareness?

HARRISWell, the program was nominally shut down in 2002. And I say nominally because Congress essentially moved to block all funding for the program known as total information awareness. But then in a rather clever and not widely noticed move, they took that money and funneled it into the classified annex of the Defense Department budget, which is essentially the black budget, the spy budget, and continued funding for a series of then unnamed counterterrorism programs, which were total information awareness. But, basically, the program was broken into pieces, moved behind a black veil and taken up by none other than the National Security Agency, which at the time unbeknownst to most Americans, was running its own total information awareness style program, monitoring Americans' phones calls and e-mails for connections to terrorism.

NNAMDIIs the government still doing some form of warrantless wiretapping?

HARRISWell, warrantless is an interesting term now. So back in the -- right after 9/11, President Bush, of course, authorized NSA to go out and monitor communications of Americans that NSA suspected were connected to terrorist, and to do that without a court order, or to do it without a warrant. Today, the law that governs intelligence surveillance, separate from law enforcement, standard guard and variety criminal surveillance -- but intelligence surveillance, is done in a way that allows the agencies to essentially write orders, what we might call warrants, but they're not individual warrants. They can go out and say well, we want to monitor, for sake of arguments lets say all calls coming into and out of this region in Afghanistan. And now if there are American phone calls mixed up in that, they are not supposed to use that as part of their intelligence work. They're not allowed to directly target an American. But effectively, they're gathering up lots of information in which Americans' calls and e-mails may be caught up. And they're not doing that with an individualized warrant. And this is a remarkable shift from our history, in the history of the Fourth Amendment quite frankly, because we have traditionally understood a warrant as something that names the individual or his place or his persons and neighbors to be searched. And now we're dealing in this intelligence realm of whole regions potentially to be looked at or whole groups of people. It's no longer so precisely individualized.

NNAMDIWhat do you make of yesterday's New York Times article headlined "U.S. Tries to Make it Easier to Wiretap the Internet" by reporter Charlie Savage, in which he said that essentially officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking websites like Facebook, and software that allows direct peer-to-peer messaging like Skype to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order? The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages. And one person said they are really -- that's the vice president for the Center for Democracy and Technology, James X. Dempsey, said they're really asking for the authority to redesign services that take advantage of the unique and how pervasive architecture of the Internet. They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function. Can that happen?

HARRISThis is the -- the question, has it happened? Not yet. But the fascinating thing here is that this is the latest chapter in a fight that began about a decade ago. Back in the mid '90s, the intelligence community and law enforcement wanted the telecom companies, your AT&T's of the world, to manufacture their new digital and fiber optic networks that, of course, were going to -- we were heralding the communication's revolution to make it so that they could be tapped very easily if the FBI or whomever showed up with a warrant. That was the important thing. They had to have a warrant. But they're saying to the phone companies, it really needs great news, super fantastic systems. That's great. But we're really worried that because they are so different from the old copper line, wire tap analog systems we're used to, we won't be able to execute wire taps very quickly. Well, fast forward a few years in that debate, they come to a compromise where they say, okay, we'll build the telephone networks in a way that they can be tapped if you show up with a warrant.

HARRISWe'll, what's on the horizon? This thing, the Internet again, and at the time, essentially, what happened was there was not so much a compromise as the FBI think it's fair to see almost retreated from its position of saying, we want to get standard set for this thing called the Internet too. We wanna have our hand involved in that too. But it was very clear -- and I have a chapter from the book writing about this -- that the FBI was not going to simply abandon the Internet and abandon its influence over. That they were going to come back for that -- that they were going to come back and look for a way to set standards on how companies essentially built the networks, so they could be tappable. Well, we're having that fight now and, of course, now, we're living in the world of Facebook and of Twitter and of social networking, a world that even at the dawn of the Internet, we couldn't have conceived of. This fight was a long time coming, and it's here now. And the FBI is not going to back away with the -- from this without a very strong contest.

NNAMDIWell, tell us if you think telecommunication companies should be required to configure their social network to allow the Feds immediate access under a warrant. And would that change how you use your BlackBerry or social network? You can call us, 800-433-8850, or go to our website, kojoshow.org, and make a comment or ask a question there. Here is Rita in Clifton, Va. Rita, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

RITAWell, my observation is that the Internet arises from a Department of Defense Java program to interconnect researchers. And what I'm thinking, well, one day happen is the FBI or someone else will bring suit to open up all communications on the Web to warrantless searches because the architecture originally was paid for via defense contract. Its hand is owned entirely by the government, and what they built upon it is merely a commercial application to a Department of Defense program.

NNAMDIWhat do you say to that, Shane Harris?

HARRISWell, I think that, legally, they would have a very hard time doing that. I mean, while it's true that the -- what we know is the Internet, the initial architecture of it, was set up under a Defense Department research program. You know, the protocols that make the Web work that it does -- the way that it does, the things that make the Web what we know were largely invented by private individuals and corporations. That said, though, I think that the government very much does look at the Internet and realizes its potential, and the irony is not lost on them, that they had a role inventing this and how it is sort out of their control.

NNAMDIRita, thank you very much for your call. We're gonna take a short break because this is during our membership campaign. When we come back, we'll be asking you to become a member, and after that, we'll return to the conversation on Shane Harris. His book is -- with Shane Harris, his book is called "The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State." I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIWelcome back to our conversation on surveillance and security -- electronic surveillance and security with Shane Harris. He's a senior writer for Washingtonian Magazine and author of the book, "The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State." We're inviting your calls at 800-433-8850. Have you ever been put on a government watch list by mistake? 800-433-8850 or you can go to our website, kojoshow.org. Join the conversation there. If you have already called, stay on the line. We will get to your call. Shane Harris, another important component to the surveillance web the government has created is, of course, cyber security. You write in "The Watchers" that Mike McConnell, the director of the -- of National Intelligence gave former President George W. Bush a sort of two-part wake-up call in 2007. Tell us what happened at that White House meeting.

HARRISIt was really an extraordinary meeting. Mike McConnell, of course, was the director of National Intelligence and also had run the National Security Agency in the mid-'90s. And he goes to this meeting in the Oval Office in the spring of '07 shortly after he had taken this job and ostensibly goes to talk to President Bush about Iraq and about some computer network kind of operations he wanted to do in Iraq and needed the president's authorization to do it. That didn't take us long as he thought it would.

NNAMDIFifteen minutes, done.

HARRISYeah, exactly. So he had a lot of time left on his hands. And McConnell had really been thinking for a long time, both from his role at NSA and the private sector when he worked at Booz Allen Hamilton here in Washington, about how vulnerable our Internet and our information networks were. And he decided to take this moment -- this opportunity to really drive it home for the president. And he said, you know, I wanna talk to you about our problem with defense. I've been talking to you about what we can do offensively with computers to people. But, you know, to give you an example, sir, of how tenuous the situation is, if the 9/11 hijackers had been computer hackers, and instead of flying planes into buildings had disabled the databases of a major financial institution or gone in and even erased the data so that a major bank could not close transactions, the markets would have reacted so overwhelmingly negatively to that, that the economic consequences of that event would've been worse than the economic consequences of 9/11 itself, which, of course, were quite traumatic. And Bush appeared very taken aback by this, and you try...

NNAMDIYeah, because on the one hand, it's great that we can do this them. But, you mean, they can do this to us.

HARRISThey can do it to us. How is that possible? So he really looks kind of incredulous at his new intelligence chief who'd, after all, only been there for a few months. And he turns to Henry Paulson, the Secretary of the Treasury and the former CEO of Goldman Sachs who was sitting next to McConnell. And he says, Hank, is that true? And the secretary responds, said, Mr. President, I'm afraid that it is. And, in fact, to emphasize Mike's point here, when I was head of Goldman Sachs, what he's describing was the thing that kept me up at night, that somebody would break into the databases and erase the transaction information, and confidence in the markets would be completely eroded. And we did see a massive erosion of -- in confidence, of course, a year later. And so Bush basically stands up from his chair, says to the room, the Internet is clearly our strategic advantage in our asset but a great vulnerability for the next 70 years. Mike McConnell, you brought this problem in here. You've got 30 days to fix it.

HARRISAnd so ensues a set of policies that the Obama administration inherited. In fact, it was a real wake up call for the president.

NNAMDIHas the Obama administration taken it forward, cyber war or cyber defense?

HARRISThey have, and both of those things. In fact, President Obama came in to office obviously having some experience with the power of the Internet, obviously, from his perspective as a campaign tool. But his campaign databases were hacked during the campaign, as were John McCain's, and this was something that he was made aware of and Mike McConnell actually talked to him about it when he was -- became president-elect. So Obama came in to office with a real sense that the Internet was vulnerable, and he got it. Imagine the way that Bush eventually got it, but Obama came in with this. And what you're seeing now is really a two-pronged approach. There are -- is a strategy moving forward that is still quite classified in many respects about cyber defense, and there's a big policy debate happening now in Washington over who in government should be doing that or helping to do that for the public Internet. And then there is a even more secret and covert aspect of cyber offense, and there, we're talking about using our own skills, the hackers that we have, really, effectively, that are employed by our government to go out and monitor foreign governments to steal their secrets like they tried to steal ours and to disrupt their way of life, if needs be, with computer and information networks.

NNAMDIOn to the telephone. Here's Ali in Arlington, Va. Ali, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

ALIThank you. While you have been talking about the geographic targeting of surveillance, what about language targeting? I know in the case of a lot of the Arab American and certainly the Afghani Americans and others of that background that speak the language, I know that, in some instances, we had heard that certain words being referenced to automatically create a, you know, a red flag in any kind of surveillance mechanism. Do you know anything about that? And also, what is the recourse? I mean, I don't know. If I happen to call my home origin or -- in the Middle East and I happen to be speaking to a friend or a cousin or whatever, I could be put under surveillance because I speak Arabic and, consequently, I am profiled, I presume, and targeted maybe in some way.

NNAMDIWell, when one is about somebody like Jim Zogby who is profiled in The Washington Post today who's constantly on the phone with leaders in the Middle East. Here's Shane Harris.

HARRISWell, here's two very interesting points. And the question about are there keywords that people in the intelligence community look for. Yes, of course. I mean, there are some words famously people have decoded in terrorist's chatter in the past that when someone is talking about a wedding, for instance, it might be code for an upcoming attack. They've probably changed that code. I would imagine that they would. But sure, there are things that the intelligence community goes out and has to monitor for. But to give you some sense of what they're up against, too, and this may provide some small amount of comfort for you.

HARRISThe amount of information that, on a daily basis, these agencies are taking in is so overwhelming that they really do have to try and narrow down their search as much as possible. So on a daily basis, I think, they're more looking for individual targets and perhaps even known suspects and trying to branch up from there with who they're involved in. That, I think, takes up a lot of the daily work. But there is also this component I think, Ali, you're alluding to when you say I'm calling a friend or a relative in the Middle East, how do I know that they're not being monitored? How do I know that, you know, a red flag isn't set off if I talk about a certain word?

HARRISAnd the answer, really, is you don't. This is highly classified, and the cases where people have tried to bring cases to even find out if they have been improperly or illegally monitored, one of those cases famously was thrown out by a judge on the grounds that the plaintiffs had no standing, which is kind of the catch-22. I want to know if the government is illegally monitoring my phone calls, but the government won't tell me if it's monitoring my phone calls so I can't prove anything. I can't even prove that I was victimized. So in terms of a recourse, there really isn't much of one. And that's why oversight is so crucially important on this issue, and it's something that really is lacking, I'm afraid.

NNAMDIAli, thank you very much for your call. We move on to Mark in Silver Spring, Md. Mark, your turn. You're -- go ahead, please.

MARKThanks, Kojo. Two comments. One is I really don't mind if the government has access to my Internet traffic. I think they need to, and I think they need to have access pretty quickly in order to protect us, the point being that these people thought that the government did not have access to the Internet to monitor traffic and communications. Then they'd go to the Internet to communicate where it could be detrimental to the well-being of this country. And with respect to encryption, this is really a question to hit. Don't encryption technologies have to be registered with the federal government? Isn't it illegal to introduce an encryption technology that has not been certified or at least reviewed by the fed?

HARRISWell, I think that the worry -- this is not a direct answer to your question -- would be, of course, that terrorist groups or criminal groups might start using encryption technology that hasn't been registered with the government. But it is true that the National Security Agency does review encryption technology and that there are rules on the exports of encryption technology and things like this, but I don't think -- it's not perfect. To give you an example, there was -- a couple of years ago, I wrote a story for National Journal about how people in the intelligence community were very worried about Skype, which is the system that people use to talk over the Internet, and that it had a very tough encryption standard. And what if -- from the NSA's perspective, what if a terrorist is using Skype and we can't crack into it fast enough?

HARRISSo they have those worries. To the question about -- you know, your point, Mark, about, you know, you don't mind if the government has access to your data. This is something that I found. Probably, people are roughly divided 50-50 on this. I mean, in reading the book, for every person -- writing the book -- for every person I encountered who had grave concerns about this, there was another to say, look, I'm not doing anything wrong. I have nothing to hide. And I think people have a very sophisticated understanding of the fact that there really is no privacy on the Internet. There is certainly anonymity in some cases, but your data is out there to be seen. So there really is, you know, cultural shifts happening in this country where...

NNAMDIBecause you say that the discussion that John Poindexter wanted to have about security, privacy and liberty would essentially become an academic discussion. Why?

HARRISWell, I think there are people in the intelligence -- and it's true that John Poindexter, really one of the innovative parts of what he was doing after 9/11 that is lost on a lot of people is that he was looking for ways to use this very kind of surveillance technology to effectively watch the watchers, you know, to encrypt personal data that's being collected, to create audit trails of who's looking at what behind in these secret government computers. That discussion, though, I think -- the minute you talk -- start talking about inserting these kinds of privacy controls and restrictions, a lot of people in the intelligence community say, well, that sounds like a restriction. That could slow us down.

HARRISAnd it is, in fact, the case, that a lot of the work that NSA did after 9/11, they eschewed this whole issue of privacy. They went away from it because it could slow the systems down, they thought. It would take too much time. It could be too costly. And it was politically quite sensitive. And it's a real tragedy, I think, that we have kind of come down on the side, perhaps, of saying, well, privacy is dead. Can't really do much about it. Let's sort of move on from that discussion. The government clearly understands that privacy is not what it was a generation ago. But there's no real incentive for them to try and start up a new debate on this right now. I mean, they're -- they have a lot of other...

NNAMDIYou say the public is largely apathetic to having the privacy discussion, unless there are big headlines in The New York Times and The Washington Post.

HARRISThat's right.

NNAMDISome big story breaks out, then we all get concerned.

HARRISThen it all changes. That's exactly right.

NNAMDIThank you very much for your call, Mark. Here's something else that I find fascinating about the whole business of connecting the dots. We got a tweet from RN (sp?), who said, "I've always had a problem when people use the phrase connect the dots. It seems to me it oversimplifies the challenges of research and analysis. How do you decide what a dot is? It seems often you only recognize a dot after the fact. For example, an individual telephone call may not be a dot until it's paired with a dozen other telephone calls. Can you walk us through where most of the dots come from these days? And when we talked about the issue of the attempt by the Nigerian man to blow up a transatlantic flight, the people collecting these disparate clues, these dots, didn't work together to prevent the attempt because the people in counterterrorism tend to be overwhelmed with data. If you've got a gazillion dots, how do you know which dot is more important than the other to try to connect until something happens? And then people say, those are the dots you should have connected."

HARRISThat's exactly right. He raises a perfectly accurate and very important point. This metaphor that we use, an often inelegant one of connecting the dots, is sort of a way of wrapping our minds around it. But first you have to know which dots are important and which dots are junk. And that is really one of the fundamental challenges that these people you're talking about in counterterrorism are dealing with every single day, the overwhelming amount of information. So a way of thinking about this, though, of where there is success and where they can make headway, the government is very good once it has a target, a known person to look at, of using technology and techniques to find out a lot about that individual, who he knows, who he's talking to, where he's going.

HARRISAnd to the point of which dots are most useful right now, it is in that context. I mean, it's no secret that the number of Predator drone strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan has increased dramatically in the past year. A lot of the success of that program -- which is targeting members of al-Qaida, of the Pakistani Taliban -- is owed to informants on the ground, who are working with the military, working with the CIA and other agencies and telling them, these are the guys you want to go after. These are the people you should be targeting. Those kinds of thoughts are very precious, and you can follow up on those and they've been very, very effective. When you're talking about the NSA going out and swallowing up communications networks, I am unconvinced that that has been very effective.

NNAMDIHere now is Craig in College Park, Md. Craig, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

CRAIGThanks a lot. I have two points I wanted to make. First is that people who say -- your guest mentioned that people are divided as to whether or not they care that their information is out there. And I think it really depends on their affinity for the project or the government that's doing the monitoring. Rush Limbaugh was a huge advocate of, if you have nothing to hide, then you shouldn't worry, you know? You can look in my underwear until he was illegally buying illegal drugs. And then he moved heaven and earth appropriately, I think, against what he purported to have as his stance to say, you can't look at my medical records. You can't go and ask my doctors about privileged communications even though I was committing a crime with it. So I think that when you tell people, I'm going to look at your things, and they say, I don't care, if you said this, oh, I'm gonna look at your grandmother's sex toy, or, I'm going to look at your child, you know, something that's embarrassing or something that's private, people don't want private things to be public.

CRAIGBut more -- the thing that was shocking me when your guest mentioned it, he said that one of the code words that the terrorist have been using for terrorist events was wedding. And if you only Google the term mistakenly attacked Afghan weddings, you will find that very, very frequently over the past seven years the United States has killed every single person in attendance at people's weddings. And I -- I mean, I was shocked when I heard them say wedding was a word for terrorist attack because I...

NNAMDIWhat do you mean specifically, Craig, by very, very frequently?

CRAIGOkay. I'll say on July 30 -- I mean, I just Googled it as soon as he said it. But I can tell you it happened at least five times. It may have happened 50 times.

NNAMDIOkay. We're running out of time very quickly, so allow me to have Shane Harris respond.

HARRISSure. I wouldn't draw a connection between unmistaken bombing of a wedding with the code word wedding. But to your first point about, you know, that people have a different position is how they feel about their e-mail or phone calls being monitored depending on their past experience, absolutely. I mean, if you've never really had an experience of your privacy being violated, there's a very good reason to believe that, you know, you consider this to be sort of an abstract threat and it's not really applying to you. A lot of the, of course, the activist community that's been especially incensed about this, there is a history of those kinds of people however being monitored by our government illegally and for political purposes. So to your point, it absolutely depends on the context, I think, of your experience and on the level of trust you have for government and for larger organizations.

NNAMDIAnd I'm afraid we're just about out of time. Shane Harris, thank you so much for joining us.

HARRISYou're welcome. It's a pleasure.

NNAMDIShane Harris is senior writer for Washingtonian Magazine and author of the book "The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State." Thank you all for listening. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.