Andrew McCarthy makes a convincing case here. Let me state for the record that I think the NSA program is wrong, for the very reason that McCarthy states.
Before anyone goes dismissing McCarthy, keep in mind that he is the guy who convicted the Blind Skeikh, Omar Abdel-Rahman, in the 1993 conspiracy to bomb the World Trade Center. McCarthy was figuring out the whole Jihad thing and going after the Jihadists years before 9/11. It was McCarthy who realized that the Jihadists, like Abdel-Rahman, were not a lunatic fringe in Islam, but actual orthodox followers of Islamic doctrine based on the Islamic trilogy–the Quran, the Hadith and the Sirah, which make up the basis of Shariah (the enemy threat doctrine).
The reason that the NSA is taking the wrong approach is directly related to the absurd way in which our elected and appointed officials have chosen to prosecute the war effort in defending us against the global Jihadist insurgency. Because we won’t identify the enemy–the State Department and CIA both forbid the use of the term “Jihad” for example–the fallback position of our bloated, bureaucratic counterterrorism apparatus is to declare EVERYONE equally suspicious. He who defends everything, defends nothing. It’s not particularly surprising that there is no firm evidence that the NSA metadata mining program was even remotely useful in preventing the Boston marathon bombing, the Fort Hood shooting massacre or the Little Rock, Arkansas Jihadi assassination of a US Army soldier–all of which could have been, and should have been, prevented by proper use of actionable intelligence…I must also confess that I am suspicious of both Rand Paul and Ken Cuccinelli. I myself have heard/seen Rand Paul say that a nuclear Iran is not a threat to US national security and Cuccinelli was directly responsible for killing American Laws for American Courts legislation in Virginia…
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/371201/rand-pauls-frivolous-nsa-lawsuit-andrew-c-mccarthy
Terror Trends Bulletin 