News that AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth gave customer records to the National Security Agency has set off a heated debate over the intricacies of espionage law. But legal or not, this sort of spying program probably isn't worth infringing our civil liberties for -- because it's very unlikely that the type of information one can glean from it will help us win the war on terrorism.

If the program is along the lines described by USA Today -- with the security agency receiving complete lists of who called whom from each of the phone companies -- the object is probably to collect data and draw a chart, with dots or ''nodes'' representing individuals and lines between nodes if one person has called another.

Mathematicians who work with pictures like this are called graph theorists, and there is an entire academic field, social network analysis, that tries to determine information about a group from such a chart, like who the key players are or who the cell leaders might be.

But without additional data, its reach is limited: as any mathematician will admit, even when you know everyone in the graph is a terrorist, it doesn't directly portray information about the order or hierarchy of the cell. Social network researchers look instead for graph features like ''centrality'': they try to identify nodes that are connected to a lot of other nodes, like spokes around the hub of a bicycle wheel.

But this isn't as helpful as you might imagine. First, the ''central player'' -- the person with the most spokes -- might not be as important as the hub metaphor suggests. For example, Jafar Adibi, an information scientist at the University of Southern California, analyzed e-mail traffic among Enron employees before the company collapsed. He found that if you naively analyzed the resulting graph, you could conclude that one of the ''central'' players was Ken Lay's secretary.

And even if you manage to eliminate all the ''central players,'' you may well still leave enough lesser players that the cell retains a complete chain of command capable of carrying out a devastating terrorist attack.

In addition, 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, for two reasons.

The simplest reason is that we're all connected. Not in the Haight-Ashbury/Timothy Leary/late-period Beatles kind of way, but in the sense of the Kevin Bacon game. The sociologist Stanley Milgram made this clear in the 1960's when he took pairs of people unknown to each other, separated by a continent, and asked one of the pair to send a package to the other -- but only by passing the package to a person he knew, who could then send the package only to someone he knew, and so on. On average, it took only six mailings -- the famous six degrees of separation -- for the package to reach its intended destination.

Looked at this way, President Bush is only a few steps away from Osama bin Laden (in the 1970's he ran a company partly financed by the American representative for one of the Qaeda leader's brothers). And terrorist hermits like the Unabomber are connected to only a very few people. So much for finding the guilty by association.

A second problem with the spy agency's apparent methodology lies in the way terrorist groups operate and what scientists call the ''strength of weak ties.'' As the military scientist Robert Spulak has described it to me, you might not see your college roommate for 10 years, but if he were to call you up and ask to stay in your apartment, you'd let him. This is the principle under which sleeper cells operate: there is no communication for years. Thus for the most dangerous threats, the links between nodes that the agency is looking for simply might not exist.

If our intelligence agencies are determined to use mathematics in rooting out terrorists, they may consider a profiling technique called formal concept analysis, a branch of lattice theory. The idea, in a nutshell, is that people who share many of the same characteristics are grouped together as one node, and links between nodes in this picture -- called a ''concept lattice'' -- indicate that all the members of a certain subgroup, with certain attributes, must also have other attributes.

For formal concept analysis to be helpful, you need much more than phone records. For instance, you might group together people based on what cafes, bookstores and mosques they visit, and then find out that all the people who go to a certain cafe also attend the same mosque (but maybe not vice versa).

While researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory have used this tool to sift through hundreds of terrorism-related reports -- and find connections that human analysts could not have found easily -- it's still dangerous to rely on the math.

This is because, as Kennedy and Lincoln assassination buffs know, two people can be a lot alike without being the same person. 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.

This isn't to say that mathematicians are useless in fighting terrorism. In September 2004 -- 10 months before the bombing of the London Underground -- Gordon Woo, a mathematician and risk-assessment consultant, gave a speech warning that London was a hotbed of jihadist radicalism. But Dr. Woo didn't anticipate violence just using math; he also used his knowledge of London neighborhoods. That's what law enforcement should have been doing then and should be doing now: using some common sense and knowledge of terrorists, not playing math games.

Math is just a tool. Used wisely, math can indeed help in warfare: consider the Battle of Britain, won in part by breaking the German codes. But use it unwisely -- as seems to be the case here -- and your approval ratings might just hit a new all-time low.

Imagine a land where bombs explode almost daily and children are killed by terrorists without conscience. On one side we find a people who suffered through the horror of slave-labor death camps; on the other side a people who suffered through a terrible war -- which they began when what they felt was their property was seized from them -- a terrible defeat and (for them) a terrible occupation. Now imagine those same peoples 15 years later, living side by side, peacefully.

This sounds like a pipe dream: The Middle East could never be this way, we think. But we do not need to imagine this land.

We are living in it.

One century after America's Civil War, the descendants of slaves daily faced the twin terrors of homicide and arson. Yet only 15 years after the rise of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the back of segregation and neo-Confederate violence had been broken.

Can Palestinians likewise mount a successful, nonviolent movement toward peaceful co-existence with their former adversaries? In short, can history repeat itself?

How expensive would it be for us if it did not? America spends an estimated $3 billion a year in support of Israel. This support is justified because Israel is a democracy and our main ally in the region. Yet we also spend $2 billion supporting Israel's nondemocratic neighbor, Egypt. Billions more have been spent maintaining bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and now Iraq. We justify these expenditures by surrendering to the serpentine excuses of realpolitik: We need the support of key figures and families in the region, we say, and so we have to work with them. Just as we once said of the Dixiecrats and other segregationist politicians in the American South.

We can transform this paradigm, as we did then, and at little cost to ourselves. We can utilize the experience of the civil rights movement -- which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice knows all too well (her childhood friend was killed by an improvised explosive device in segregated Birmingham) -- to assist Palestinians in their stride toward peace. What we need is a Muslim Martin Luther King.

Many believe that leaders are born, not made, but programs to cultivate leadership and promote good will among men have been used successfully for generations. Oxford's Rhodes Scholarship is one such example. Its idea is to bring the best and brightest from the British Commonwealth (and beyond) to build strong ties among English-speaking peoples, and stronger ties to England. Founder Cecil Rhodes, pirate though he was, wished for there to be "an understanding between the three great powers" -- America, Britain and Germany -- that "will render war impossible."

What we recommend is a sister program for the Middle East. One could hold a competition for the 30 best young orators in the Palestinian diaspora. (King first gained prominence at age 26, and the Rhodes Scholarship is only for men and women under that age.) Send them to an American institution such as Stanford University, where they could study for the doctorate under Professor Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project and historian of the civil rights movement and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Then, after they have spent several years studying the African American experience with special courses and lecturers, focusing especially on the efficacy of nonviolent direct action, send them back to their native lands.

This is no program of indoctrination. Indeed, it would be detrimental if American spy organizations were to infiltrate or interfere with the King scholars in any way: the scholars would lose all credibility at home. Just as King spoke out against Southern injustice (and American injustice in Vietnam), the King scholars must be free to criticize America and, it is to be expected, the occupation. They would not be able to lead the Arab street otherwise.

By bringing young leaders from the region, we would avoid disasters like the U.S. Army's flirtation with mathematician Ahmed Chalabi, a man who had no real roots in Iraq, but whom America still wished to enthrone as a new shah. The Chalabi experiment blew up in America's face like a roadside bomb.

The King scholarship program might cost only $2 million per year -- an endowment of perhaps $20 million could put it on its feet indefinitely. And, coupled with the application of "soft power," the export of American culture -- notably, hip-hop music, which serves both as a mechanism for promoting intercultural understanding and as a nonviolent channel for youthful aggression -- one could reasonably expect to see the flower of peace bloom in the desert of despair.

Two specific aspects of the civil rights movement would be most effective in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: first, the proper utilization of legal instruments as a way to wage a nonviolent campaign; second, the utilization of mosques to mobilize a nonviolent grassroots struggle. Mosques in the West Bank and Gaza can be used to promote peace over violence and terrorism, and the African American experience can teach Palestinians how to do this.

In "The Trial" by Franz Kafka, at one point two men stand outside a gate. One seeks to enter; the other seeks to prevent him from entering. Both men wait there for their entire lives. Though one is guard and the other the one guarded, both men are prisoners.

In game theory, the branch of mathematics made famous by "A Beautiful Mind," there is a paradox called the Prisoners' Dilemma. Each of two prisoners may believe it is in his best interests to harm the other, but one can mathematically prove that both men would be better off if they cooperated. A King scholars program might help us resolve the prisoners' dilemma that is the Middle East.

This is a utopian dream, perhaps. But another man dreamed, once, and we all know what became of that man's dream.

We are living it.

Does the conflict in Iraq amount to a civil war? In many ways, the public debate over this question is largely political. Calling Iraq a "civil war" implies yet another failure for the Bush administration and adds force to the question of whether U.S. troops still have a constructive role to play.

Politics aside, however, the definition of civil war is not arbitrary. For some -- and perhaps especially Americans -- the term brings to mind all-out historical conflicts along the lines of the U.S. or Spanish civil wars. According to this notion, there will not be civil war in Iraq until we see mass mobilization of sectarian communities behind more or less conventional armies.

But a more standard definition is common today:

1) Civil war refers to a violent conflict between organized groups within a country that are fighting over control of the government, one side's separatist goals, or some divisive government policy.

By this measure, the war in Iraq has been a civil war not simply since the escalation of internecine killings following the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February, but at least since the United States handed over formal control to an interim Iraqi government in June 2004.

Here's why: Although the insurgents target the U.S. military, they are also fighting the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government and killing large numbers of Iraqis. There is little reason to believe that if the United States were suddenly to withdraw its forces, they would not continue their battle to control or shape the government.

Political scientists who study civil war have proposed various refinements to this rough definition to deal with borderline cases. One issue concerns how much killing has to occur -- and at what rate.

2) For a conflict to qualify as a civil war, most academics use the threshold of 1,000 dead, which leads to the inclusion of a good number of low-intensity rural insurgencies.

Current estimates suggest that more than 25,000 Iraqis have been killed in fighting since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 -- a level and rate of killing that is comparable to numerous other conflicts that are commonly described as civil wars, such as those in Lebanon (1975-1990) and Sri Lanka (beginning in 1983).

The organization -- or rather, disorganization -- of the warring communities in Iraq means that a large-scale conventional conflict along the lines of the U.S. Civil War is unlikely to develop. More probable is a gradual escalation of the current "dirty war" between neighborhood militias that have loose ties to national political factions and are fighting almost as much within sectarian lines as across them.

This is roughly what happened in Lebanon and at a lower level in Turkish cities in the late 1970s. Ethnic cleansing will occur not as a systematic, centrally directed campaign (as in Bosnia), but as a result of people moving to escape danger.

And there's another twist to the terminology:

3) If the conflict in Iraq becomes purely a matter of violence between Sunni and Shiite communities driven by revenge and hatred rather than by political goals, many political scientists would say that it is something other than civil war.

Almost no one, for example, calls the Hindu-Muslim violence in India a civil war.

A civil war has to involve attempts to grab power at the center of government or in a given region, or to use violence to change some major government policy.

In Iraq's case, however, the vacuum of power at the center means that communal violence will inevitably be tied to struggles for political power and control.

A final complication concerns the nature of international involvement. Some argue, for example, that the war in Bosnia should be seen as an interstate war rather than a civil war, since the Bosnian Serb forces were armed and directed largely by Belgrade. Post-Mobutu violence in Congo is often termed a civil war, even though fighters have been closely tied to armies from neighboring states.

4) A conflict may be both a civil and an interstate war at the same time.

The Vietnam War, for instance, clearly comprised both a civil war in the South and an interstate war involving the North, the South and the United States.

Iraq may be moving in this direction. The United States and Britain are already openly involved, and such neighboring countries as Iran and Syria are more covertly involved. Not that it matters to the people dying there, but the next debate here may turn on whether what is already a civil war in Iraq should be viewed as an interstate war as well.