The Real Question the NSA Needs to Answer

The tech companies are begging the NSA to let them say how many requests they've acceded to, and my bet is that they'll concede.  It doesn't really matter what the number is, it will be tiny relative to the number of users, and it will seem insignificant to most law abiding, voting citizens.  It seems to me that the plan is that at that stage it will all go away. However, they're answering the wrong question, a favourite tactic of politicians: if cornered, and asked a question you don't want to answer, answer a different question. 

PRISM: Big Data and Pre-Crime

Fantastic Universe, February 1956:
Pride of my Collection

In February 1956, the Science Fiction magazine Fantastic Universe published a short story from a young writer called Philip K Dick, called The Minority Report.  Stephen Spielberg made a fine movie of the story in 2002, the latest in a series of Dick's stories to be converted to the screen, including Blade Runner and Total Recall.  Dick's account of bureaucrats predicting when people were likely to commit crimes - and arresting them before they did - was extraordinarily prescient.