The American Bar Association’s Phony NSA Surveillance Poll

On CBS News radio this morning, I listened to an interview with someone from the ABA who cited the results of a recent poll the group commissioned on the NSA surveillance program. You won’t be surprised to learn that the ABA poll, unlike other polls, found that a majority of Americans oppose the program. But to get these results they had to “cook the books.” The poll results were weighted for age, sex, race and geography but apparently not political affiliation/leanings. But even if one assumes the political distribution was about right, the poll questions, as you’ll see here, were misleading, to put mildly, and omitted key facts. For example, perhaps you didn’t know that the president, through the NSA program, has suspended “the constitutional freedoms of people like you.” And somehow the pollster forgot to mention the name “al Qaeda” or the fact that the program is attempting to rapidly intercept communications from an al Qaeda terrorist outside the U.S. to a person inside the U.S. You know, the situation where an al Qaeda terrorist is picked-up in Malaysia with his pockets stuffed with American phone numbers and names — or perhaps with those names and numbers on his computer hard drive. Here’s the ABA’s press release announcing the poll results: