Thank You Qwest dot Org

Thank You Qwest dot Org has been created to centralize and promote the idea of providing positive feedback to a company that did something right. It also contains a lot of information about and arguments against the idea of wholesale data mining to find terrorist networks (and, regardless of what the President says, there's no way that tens of millions of phone records could all be directly tied to terrorist activity). Here's a quote from the site that sums up what I think it's all about:

Imagine how useful it would be for the Bush Administration to type in the name of, say, Seymour Hersh, and find out every government insider he’s talked to on the phone for the past four years?

What better way to hide the fact that you're spying on political enemies than to request records for millions of people, rather than just the subjects of interest? There's simply no excuse for invading people's privacy, even if all the government is interested in getting is a set of baseline statistical information for the population in general (in which case, personal information could be hidden by systematically replacing names and numbers with randomly generated symbols).

The Christian Science Monitor has an informative article about the utility of data mining for catching terrorists.

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
     -- Benjamin Franklin