It's the difference between a peace footing and a war footing. The US broke off the lever that switches between the two.

Nuclear physicists broke off the lever. The intelligence community has been holding things together with duct tape ever since, successfully so far.

We should seriously ask whether the NSA is broken before we try fixing it. If a mushroom cloud over Indianapolis is a 10 on the civil liberty infringement scale, many people would rank domestic surveillance as a 0.0001.

Right, because nuclear terrorism is what the NSA is looking for. Nice rhetorical posturing there, big guy.

Well, the threat of a dirty bomb or actual nuclear payload being smuggled into a U.S. city by a terrorist group really is something the NSA is watching for. It's just not the only thing they're watching for.

I wish they'd been watching for fraud on the part of the biggest banks, which has done America a lot more damage than a smuggled bomb. Putting it in Indianapolis is rank pandering to the Tea Party, though. Back in 2003, my dad (also in (rural) Indiana) professed to be in fear of Saddam Hussein. I told him at the time that even if Saddam Hussein actually had any way to affect him, he'd never heard of Indiana.

And yet it's the heartland running on sheer terror to demand safety instead of their liberty.

Indianapolis was the site of a full-dress-rehersal nuclear interdiction field exercise. It is also a literary allusion to a well-known science fiction story in which Indianapolis is sacrificed to an alien nuclear attack.

Saddam Hussein could have trivially smashed the economy of Indiana as part of larger dsruptions of the world economy. The actual error is that by 2003 he was utterly deterred. Gulf War I taught him all about staying on his little patch of sand.

This discussion contains only the political partisanship you projected onto it. You need to learn that clear strategic analysis often contradicts or supports political dogma by coincidence.

Bah. It was in Indianapolis for the reasons I mentioned in my post - pandering and terror. That you now cite it as a reason to worry about Indianapolis is rather circular. As to your citing science fiction, I'd like to remind you that Close Encounters of the Third Kind took place in Indiana as well - should I be watching the skies?

This discussion contains all the political "partisanship" it needs, son. Get over yourself before you presume to tell me what I need to learn.

Also catching a dirty bomb by listening to peoples conversations is nearly impossible. Even a moderate false positive rate (like the conversation we are having now) hides any useful data.

Prospectively you are right. But once you have a single solid lead on the opposition, SIGINT lets you mop them up in short order.

Stimson got over it pretty quickly.

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/06/10/building-am...