In algorithmic terms, a "computer" (the US defense establishment) is examining another "computer" (al-Qaeda) to find its halt state, and, to complicate matters, the examinee knows of the monitoring. [...] Even if a data base existed with full optics and sound that replicated ALL activity in Eurasia alone, any one action could, or might not, be an encoding of terrorist intelligence and for this reason, interpretation would become the job of the same people who failed to bring in the "twentieth highjacker" for questioning. Our government would have to refute, at the level of basic science, Alonzo Church's thesis to the effect that all computers are Turing machines, and it would have to make or buy a Turing+n system that could defeat other Turing+0 systems.

The problem is that the United States is engaged (like it or not) in a dialogue with terrorists. If like Sharon in Israel and Cheney here, our statesmen play to the gallery, and "refuse" to "dialog" with "terrorists", they discover that violence becomes the language of choice.

One should remember that a positive match from these monitoring systems can be a false positive. In fact, the false positives may well be 10 or 100 times more numerous than matches of real "terrorist activity". And even if only one match in 100 would be a false positive, that one wrongly matched individual could be you. And how would you prove that you are innocent? This reminds me of Kafka's "Trial".