It is also difficult to envisage that the foreign-domestic segregation of zeros and ones can be properly maintained. It is not uncommon for a simple phone call from London to a mobile phone in Manchester, for example, to be rerouted thru the United States. In this age of globalization, private sector companies often find innovative ways to reduce costs. There are pending cases in American courts and Federal Communication Commission reports that serve as landmark attempts to define origination and termination of calls. Calls from an American city are often looped through private networks in Canada, the UK or Mexico and then delivered to another town in the same state, to bypass fixed tariffs. Given the transit through another country, will this be a foreign or a domestic matter?

Modern techniques of delivering information (Internet files transfer music, pictures, mobile phone videos, instant messaging, encrypted messages, etc) are diverse and complex enough to leave lots of room for highly subjective manipulation of facts. Can a file attached to an email, say a song about love and hate (found in every culture), serve as a clue about terrorist activities? What if that song is an American gangster rap album about guns and bullets in a ghetto?

Secondly, the cultural gap stands in the way of objective and proper analysis. It simply cannot be overcome. Accurate analysis can only be derived from human knowledge and firsthand understanding, not by machines and automated systems. Many Americans have a hard time with British or Australian choices of words, let alone with various dialects of Hindi, Arabic or Chinese! A simple surf through websites for American law enforcement agencies provides proof that there is an acute shortage of linguists among their ranks. Can James Bond speak Urdu?

Thirdly, Americans tend to rely on automation for analysis, albeit machines programmed by humans. There are many reports of immigrants in America being denied mortgages or banking services, simply because they have very common names that “score high” or appear on a list of designated persons by the Office of Foreign Assets Control in the U.S. Treasury Department. Thus, it is beyond imagination that machines can sort thru the context of communication (whether voice or email) in different languages, let alone distinguish customs, imperfect slang, indirect expression, idioms, jokes, poetry, old prose or simple one-liners that are frequently exchanged by email these days for comic relief.

A raw duplication of the Colossus or re-enactment of breaking Nazi codes is mere show business for politicians in an upcoming election cycle, just to show that they are busy. However, such authority is not likely to produce any tangible results, especially for a government that could not infiltrate the close circles of Saddam or bin Laden and his pack of violent terrorists. Nor did similar surveillance forecast the massive economic collapse of the USSR. It is merely another opportunity to sell gizmos to the government, fleece the taxpayer while omitting the most important yet most difficult factor -- the human “software” and the knowledge desperately needed to find and deal with the root causes of the problem. Afghan and Pakistani caves have no hardware to generate electricity or electronic signals, but they are loaded with hateful beings!