If the critics don’t think the NSA should be collecting this information, perhaps they would like to explain just how they would have us stop new terrorist attacks. Terrorists don’t have armies or navies we can track with satellites. There are only three ways we can get information to prevent terrorist attacks:

The first is interrogation — getting the terrorists to tell us their plans. But thanks to Barack Obama, we don’t do that anymore.

The second is penetration, either by infiltrating agents into al-Qaeda or by recruiting operatives from within the enemy’s ranks. This is incredibly hard — and it got much harder, thanks to the leak exposing a double agent, recruited in London by British intelligence, who had penetrated al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and helped us break up a new underwear bomb plot in Yemen — forcing the extraction of the agent.

That leaves signals intelligence — monitoring the enemy’s phone calls and Internet communications — as our principal source of intelligence to stop terrorist plots. Now the same critics who demanded Obama end CIA interrogations are outraged that he is using signals intelligence to track the terrorists. Well, without interrogations or signals intelligence, how exactly is he supposed to protect the country?