Of course they stopped no terrorists, so I was joking that neither will they stop the program. Whether continued by other governmental efforts or if this one explicitly continues itself, the government has outright lied many, many times in the past, about a great many different things.

I still believe that there is some hidden reason for all the financial costs and overblown efforts at data-mining, beyond "terrorism" or plain-jane control. It's just too big, too widescale. It feels like one of those rare instances where reality is getting dangerously close to full-on science fantasy.