Your thoughts on Snowden

[CityOfNoobs]

Invasion of privacy to combat crime. I support that.

To me violent crime is far worse than my loss of privacy in front of a bunch of anonymous CIA or NSA agents.

And by its very nature surveillance has to be as secret as possible. If it was totally open and public then it wouldn't be able to combat crime as effectively. This isn't anything new. All nations have always had secret agencies to fight the bad guys.

 

You are, in my view, one of the scariest type of people , and it is people that make such arguments that actually make me very glad that we do not live in any semblance of a democracy.

I am a strong proponent of the non-aggression principle, and a strong opponent of preemptive strikes. These issues are at the core of not only the PRISM scandal but also at the heart of our foreign policy for the last few decades. By sanctioning the idea of preemptively striking a military target, even when no direct threat exists, one creates a dangerous precedent. If the military (president) can strike targets for  reasons other than self defense why cant the rest of the government? The FBI, CIA, NSA, and all the other three letter agencies looked at the examples set by our military leadership through the century and finally decided to catch up with some preemptive strikes of their own, by targeting every single human being they possibly could, regardless of nationality. The recent revelations about our military’s drone strikes, and their reckless nature (killing dozens of innocents because there “might” have bee a target in the area.) show that our country fully embraces the idea that safety and power are its number one goal. To combat many of the ills of our government we as a society need to realize that the ethical thing is not always the safest thing, and that being right is better than being in control.

The argument that no harm is done by the invasions of our privacy is simply terrifying to me, the Constitution which is supposed to be the supreme law of our country has made it quite clear that the many cannot simply give away the rights of the few, and that we have certain rights as humans not granted to us by government, but rights that come with existence. To simply throw all of that away because it may help stop the bad guys is not something I would hope many are willing to do.

Those who would give up liberty for security deserve neither.