Hi 4321,
There are many other ways to be bad than being a terrorist.
Another very bad sort of bad is deploying a secret surveillance state on everyone in the world.
The traditions of liberty are that a person has a right to privacy and this right is only breached in the event that there is a probable cause to do so.
If there is, you go out and get a court order.
Meanwhile, if you think the scary part of AQ is unaware of US online surveillance models, then you are living on the moon already. Bin Laden used couriers and avoided cell phones and wore a cowboy hat for a reason.
The only folks that likely get discovered via surveillance are the lone wolves. You are more likely to get killed by an oligodendroglial tumor than by a lone wolf terrorist.
So unless you think we should put a few million folks to work on oligodendrogliomas to save them, I daresay it isn't worth selling our liberty for the elimination of every terrorist threat either.
| 
