| 20happyballs said: You have nothing to fear unless you are a terrorist. The government would not use the evidence they can obtain from these programs on just any matter of criminal offense. They would not risk being exposed. And if anyone is afraid of their private matters being exposed, or a government official knowing what you do (whether it be cheating, child pornography, and other embarrassing things), it's not like the government officials are even gonna care. They are technically monitoring millions of people. You are just a name and nothing else. They don't care what you do, as long as it does not involve spying, terrorism, or whatever acts they deem a matter of national security. |
Assuming they told us the truth, that's sound reasoning. They didn't. They lied through their teeth about this being "only metadata." That, and I should remind you that when Social Security was enacted, there was a specific guarantee that the social security number would never be used for identification. Something about people not wanting to be numbers. I don't need to tell you how that wound up.
My problem is that this program is only a whisker away from abuse. Take what happened in the IRS scandal, where IRS agents were asking questions they had no constitutional authority to ask and then leaking that information to the press. If there's even a whisker of abuse in this system, the party in power when it got corrupted will never lose power. Now consider that the IRS doesn't have anywhere near the secrecy-quotient of the NSA, either: abuse would be very hard to detect and punish because the NSA security clearances.
Then there's personal abuse. You don't need to listen to too many random phone calls to find blackmail material. It is eminently practical for an unscrupulous person in the right place to turn something legal, but secret for those involved--like closet homosexuality or adultery--into personal gain. And how they got the information is a state-protected secret.
Then there's the success issue. So they stopped one bomber. They also failed to catch the Boston Bombers when the Russians specifically warned us about them. The one they caught could be legit, or it could be a fluke.
Corruption would be very damaging. It would be hard to detect if it happened because it's behind a security clearance. It's debatable that it's had any effect. On all sides, this program isn't worth it.
