NYTimes on the panopticon

A good rebuke to claims that NSA programs are 'benign' or 'modest' sacrifices of privacy in the NYTimes draws a letter:

To the Editor;

The claim about NSA 'dragnet' programs like Prism, as emphasized by James Rule in "The price of panopticon" (June 12, 2013), that "... no serious analyst can doubt that such steps may be helping to pinpoint terrorist acts in advance, as supporters, like Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, have insisted," rest on two questions.  First, do other, less Constitutionally suspect measures exist that can work equally well?  And second, have people who are not terrorists been unduly burdened or investigated through faulty analysis of massive medadata connections?

Until both of these are rigorously examined, debated and proven, please take all claims about the necessity of big data government surveillance as abrogation of our fourth Amendment rights.