Nobody Ever Said Big Brother Was Bright...

Wired points out the fact that the problem with mass surveillance (Constitutional issues aside) is that it flat out doesn't work:

There are few, if any, studies demonstrating the effectiveness of mass surveillance. People with something to hide are adept at speaking in codes. Teenagers tell their parents they are "going to the movies" when they are going to drink beer. Attackers know to misspell the victim's name, as journalist Daniel Pearl's kidnappers and murderers did, to evade e-mail surveillance. Meanwhile, modern filtering technology can't distinguish between breast cancer websites and pornographic ones.

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