Let Congress amend the surveillance laws to support data-mining.

David Ignatius has this WaPo op-ed:

As we learn more about what was going on under the Bush administration's secret surveillance program, it's clear the National Security Agency has developed some powerful new tools against terrorist adversaries. That's all the more reason these innovative spying methods should be brought within the rule of law -- so that they can be used effectively and legally.

That should be a New Year's resolution for Congress and the administration: Amend our laws on surveillance to establish a framework for using these new techniques of collecting and analyzing information....

Although the headline has been "warrantless wiretapping," the Times accounts suggest the program actually was something closer to a data-mining system that collected and analyzed vast amounts of digitized data in an effort to find patterns that might identify potential terrorists....

This is the kind of innovative technology the government should be using, with appropriate safeguards. It employs computer algorithms to discern patterns that would probably be invisible to human analysts. It searches electronically amid the haystack of information for the one dangerous needle. In the phrase that was often used in the scathing Sept. 11 post-mortems, it seeks to "connect the dots."

So, an important new technique is being used, it seems, and it doesn't correspond very well to the activities Congress has attempted to regulate in the past. Rather than dwelling on whether it agrees with the President's legal interpretation of the existing legal texts, Congress ought to design the right legislation that clearly supports the beneficial and nonabusive use of the new techniques.

UPDATE: Marty Lederman participates in the comments, citing this post of his over at Balkinization, and I try to respond.