The view on NSA from Bizarro World

This guy probably thinks Egil Krogh deserves a belated medal for heading up the Nixon plumbers squad at the Watergate. From the Washington Post, whose editorial page seems to be on a different planet from the news operation:

The Right Call on Phone Records
The NSA's Program Safeguards Security -- and Civil Liberties

By Richard A. Falkenrath
Saturday, May 13, 2006; Page A17

On Thursday, USA Today reported that three U.S. telecommunications companies have been voluntarily providing the National Security Agency with anonymized domestic telephone records -- that is, records stripped of individually identifiable data, such as names and place of residence. If true, the architect of this program deserves our thanks and probably a medal. That architect was presumably Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and President Bush's nominee to become director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

You have to love this ID at the end of the article.

The writer is a fellow at the Brookings Institution. He was deputy homeland security adviser and deputy assistant to the president until May 2004. He has no official knowledge of the program in question.

"No official knowledge?" Any unofficial knowledge? Does he deserves a medal, too, for whatever role he played in this great idea?

His 6 Degrees of Separation argument in the column has a hollow ring. What about the millions of Americans who don't call or get calls from Osama? Is it OK to burn down the whole haystack to find the needle?