Mathmagicians At the NSA?

So it's been a while since my last post but this much-shared Op-Ed piece from the NY Times lured me out of hiding. This Op-Ed writer criticizes the collection of call records from phone companies. There are some surprisingly funny quotes in a rather cerebral article.

[The] National Security Agency's entire spying program seems to be based on a false assumption: that you can work out who might be a terrorist based on calling patterns. While I agree that anyone calling 1-800-ALQAEDA is probably a terrorist, in less obvious situations guilt by association is not just bad law, it's bad mathematics...
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Even if there is only a 1 in 150 million chance that someone might share the profile of a terrorist suspect, it still means that, in a country the size of the United States, two people might share that profile. One might be a terrorist, or he might be Cat Stevens.