Will the NSA's tracking of our phone calls make us safer? Probably not.

The "tracking" part makes sense. Assuming that intelligence had sussed out suspected terrorists, certainly the vast database could be used to track whom those people had called.

The "detecting" part, however, is another story. Can terrorists be spotted simply by analyzing who calls whom and when — without any other leads?

There's reason to be skeptical.

That's because diverse kinds of human organizations share certain traits. If you and I and 17 other people are in a book club, we're likely to call each other often. Sometimes almost all of us would ring up just one person on the same day to ask, "Can I bring dessert to tonight's meeting?"

Viewed in silhouette, in the cold analysis of a computer, it might indeed be apparent from our phone records that the 19 of us frequently communicate to plan something. But further investigation would be necessary to determine just what we were up to.

Can the government dig deeper into all of these groups?

So if the government imagines that it has detected a pattern of phone calls that might suggest that I am a terrorist they then need to get permission to bug my phone for further data gathering? That may be the flimsiest reasoning I have ever heard.

So then the question is how many of us are currently under government scrutiny simply because we are organizing a surprise party for our boss? And the other question is how much time and money does this cost our government? But the biggest question is will this keep us safer?

No. It will not.

We have to imagine that there are only a small number of potential terrorists in the country willing to do us harm. These guys are nestled among hundreds of millions of people. They are making phone calls that are among hundreds of billions of phone calls. It would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to finance this NSA program and virtually every single lead will be a dead end. So where could that money be more wisely spent?

And don't tell me that it will all be worth it if we can stop even one terrorist attack. Of course it would if it had a snowball's chance in Hell of working, which it does not.