Media is ruining the NSA debate

[Commentary] The revelation of the National Security Agency's collecting all our telephone metadata has supposedly sparked a "national conversation" -- a great debate taking on all the thorny issues surrounding privacy vs. security. Sadly, though, the "national conversation" has for the most part been shallow, often bordering on stupid.

That's because nearly everybody has retreated to their respective camps, refusing to recognize the validity of opposed arguments or the fact that this there is no easy solution to the problem of how we should go about strengthening our security while also, to the extent possible, protecting liberty and privacy. It's also because so much of the "conversation" has taken place on Twitter, where conversations, and certainly debates, should never take place, because they are engineered to be superficial. (Twitter's great for linking to stuff and for issuing pithy one-liners; it's absolutely useless for conversation.) In defending longstanding worldviews, rather than honestly addressing the issue, people are talking past each other.