There is no regard for real security among these people. The only secrets they protect are political.

If people understood the Islamic attitude towards banking, they would know why they are not apt to get much of any worth from Islamic fundamentalists, who believe charging interest on money is evil. Islamic “banks” are more like cooperatives than financial institutions. Money transfers are often made like the medieval Jewish banking system, a matter of letters of credit, rather than transfers of money, with transfers of actual assets taking place at intervals.

What people in the West refuse to understand is that what we would call smuggling is a normal and “honest” method of earning a living in much of the Middle East.

At lot of people making donations to buy medical supplies for Muslim countries and been swept up in this paranoia and Osama bin Laden is still free.

Sorry to latch onto this last and least bit of your post, but I am reminded of an article I read recently on Bruce Schneier’s site. A company’s own IT staff cooked up a virus, installed it on a bunch of memory sticks and scattered them in the parking lot of their own company. The virus was designed to find and mail back passwords gathered from the machine into which the stick was plugged. Many installations of Windows prevent autorun from, say, a floppy disk, but not from a USB memory stick. The IT staff received an astonishing number of emails of passwords from the company’s own staff who fell for the notion of “free” thumb drives. Now there’s “social engineering” at its finest.

Back to topic. I now operate on the assumption that any branch of government, as well as any corporation that has an interest, has any information about me that it wants. It doesn’t change my behavior much, because I’m not interested in wreaking havoc. But I suspect Osama bin Laden makes the same assumption, and that he has separate avenues for laundering large sums of money, and that all this surreptitiously acquired bank transaction info has not affected his behavior at all, either. And that’s not good, because he obviously is interested in wreaking havoc.

Like you, Bryan, I lack faith in two things: the government’s ability to protect the information it gathers, and the government’s ability to use it in any constructive nonpolitical way to enhance national security. All that hay they’re gathering is bound to end up producing nothing but, oh well, you know, what hay usually produces in the long run.