Mine that metadata

This editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal (https://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324299104578529373994191586.html) perfectly captures my sense of the tempest unleashed by one of what it correctly calls the Guardian’s “anti-antiterror partisans.”  With its usual hyperventilation, that community on the Left is now insisting that the United States dismantle one of its remaining weapons in the death struggle with those who are primarily driven by the supremacist Islamic doctrine of shariah to kill as many of us “infidels” as possible.

As the Journal notes, this metadata-mining tool and the utility it has for discerning patterns of communications and relationships, and thereby for detecting possible jihadist networks, have become all the more essential since a number of other counter-terror capabilities have been eliminated.  Some – like detentions and aggressive interrogation techniques – President Obama blithely dispensed with unilaterally.  Others – like the cell-phone tracking capabilities used for a time to try to locate Osama bin Laden – have been compromised, and thereby rendered useless, by previous leaks to the media.

In fact, the Journal editorial reminds us, even this program was the subject of such a previous leak.  It has subsequently been duly authorized, briefed and broadly supported by both executive (Bush 43 and Obama), legislative and judicial authorities.

The danger now arising is that libertarians putatively on the Right are wont to join forces with those on the far Left to render us ever less capable of providing for the common defense.  Fresh from the sequestration fight – in which sufficient numbers of such-minded Republicans helped the majority of Democrats hollow out the U.S. military – and buoyed by their success in railing against the use of remotely piloted vehicles (a.k.a. “drones”) against Americans in U.S. cafes, they seem determined to demagogue the data-mining issue until we abandon this vital weapon, too.

Protections against abuse of the data being mined are in place.  If there is evidence that, notwithstanding such protections, the Obama administration is engaged (as it has elsewhere, to be sure, in abusive misuse of its powers) those protections should be strengthened.  But we should not unilaterally deny ourselves an instrument critical to the defeat stealthy jihadist networks and operations, here and abroad.