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http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NzhmOWI1MGE2ZTM5OTNjYmVmZjI3MzZlYWM5ZmUwZmI=

Hayden doesn’t have anything on his plate nearly as important as getting members of Congress reelected.

So if we’re going to have a national conversation about government data mining, by all means let’s have it. But let’s not just put the administration and General Hayden under the microscope.

Let’s examine the practices of the opposition that purports to find warehousing information and tracking data about American citizens to be the death-knell of liberty.

Let’s take a hard look at the elected officials who are taking a hard look at the NSA.

Here are a just a few questions we might ask Democratic-party chairman Howard Dean and the members of the judiciary and intelligence committees currently grousing for the cameras:

* Do you maintain databases of American citizens for fundraising purposes?

* Do those databases contain names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, and other identifying information?

* Do the databases contain information about the interests of the citizens who have been entered into them? About candidates or causes to which they have previously donated money?

* Are those databases searchable? If so, what search criteria do you use to divide these American citizens into various categories?

* Do you do targeted mailings for purposes of raising funds or pushing particular issues?

* When you target, how do you know whom to target? That is, what kind of information do you maintain in your databases to guide you about which potential donors or voters might be fruitful to tap on which particular issues?

* Do you trade information about American citizens with other politicians and organizations in the expectation that they might reciprocate and you all might mutually exploit the benefits?

I’m betting the answers to these questions might prove pretty interesting.

Hard as this may be to comprehend, we may even find that our Big Brother on Capitol Hill has been collecting information on all of us … without (gasp!) judicial warrants.