THE CHARACTERIZATION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY AS A “U.S. GESTAPO” is rather overwrought — and not even supported by what comes next in this article from The Register. But this part is dead on:

The Feds will know what you’re buying and what you’re reading and what you’re watching on TV, but they certainly won’t be in a position to use any of that to stop terrorists. They’ll be swimming in data, drowning in it, hopelessly struggling to sort it out. Keep in mind that the current Congressional hearings on the CIA/FBI intel failures indicate not that the agencies lacked the raw data they needed, but rather that they were unable to distinguish the signal from the noise. And now we’re to have an enormous new Department which can accomplish nothing more than to get a lot more federal employees listening to a lot more noise.

Right — we feel safer already.