>Is Fox News illegal? You'd say it's illegal to deceive people. The sheer quantity of false information on Fox >News, and it's popularity, are a serious harm to America.

>Is it that free markets only perform properly with rational agents?

To the contrary, I'd say it isn't 'illegal to deceive people'. (in most circumstances.)  First Amendment to the US Constitution and all that.

Further, I'd say that currently the claim Rove made is false, but mostly it became false because the capacity of the hard drives that would be installed in that data center increased by at least a factor of 1000x between the time the data center was proposed (I assume it was around 2001-2002).  At that time, it's possible briefings merely claimed that the system would hold all American metadata, not the actual audio itself.  

And I wouldn't expect Fox's journalist to catch that error instantly, either.  It requires a substantial amount of thought, and technical knowledge.  I knew that his claim is wrong, because I'd previously considered the same calculation (very approximately) and I knew that the capacity of the buildings would at least be many hundreds, and in fact thousands, of times larger than would be required for metadata collection.

      Jim Bell