On Jun 18, 8:40*am, Robert Macy wrote:
On Jun 17, 8:40*am, nestork wrote:

No, I think her answer was OK.

She said she'd rather the government was allowed to monitor people's
communications so that homegrown terrorists can be caught than people
having to feel unsafe everywhere they go, and as an opinion, that's
perfectly valid.

...snip...

I basically don't mind monitoring of 'public' activities, since it is
outside your home and affects people, seems like a reasonable loss of
'privacy', especially if all that surveillance is used to ensure
safety for all. But, such monitoring didn't provide much safety in
Boston.

The logic there doesn't add up. It's like saying that just
because those particular methods didn't prevent every event,
those methods are not effective in keeping us safer. NSA
has said that the methods that were recently disclosed
did help prevent or disrupt dozens of terrorist attacks both here
and in 20 other countries.




Plus, the IRS, is an example, proving to everybody, that govt
intrusion into your business will probably not be used for the
intended purpose [in their case, to prevent tax abuse] but used rather
for harrassment and control.

Again, this is a big overreach. The IRS has used the overwhelming
majority of all the information provided to it by taxpayers over
decades
for the purpose intended. Just because there is one incident where
it has been abused doesn't mean the whole premise, the whole thing
is bad. That's like saying because two cops somewhere abused
their authority, beat up a suspect, etc, that all law enforcement is
not doing what it's supposed to be doing.

The ironic thing about the current situation is that so far, we only
know of one person abusing the information they were privy to.
And that is Townsend, who looks more and more like he's
anti-American and possibly has been helping the Chinese for
who knows how long. One mighty fine question in all this is how
this guy got to all that stuff. My suspicion was that since he was
involved in network security, he figured out how to get into parts
of NSA that he had no business ever being in.




Therefore, completely understandable why
citizenry has said, NO! to all this surveillance, because it is seen
as a tool to control, not make their lives any safer.

I don't know on what basis you're concluding that. For example,
the beauty queen gave a total green light to what sounded like
unlimited surveilance, and the audience cheered her. I've
seen polls that show that a majority of Americans are OK with
NSA collecting phone records. They have concerns about it,
but they have not said "no" to it.

It's not too hard to see how this is a powerful tool. Say there
is a raid on a terrorist house in Somalia or Pakistan. They find
papers that have some phone numbers on them. They find
a disposable cell phone bought God knows where. Clearly
being able to then run those numbers against the phone records
NSA has logged would be a powerful tool. You'd find who, if
anyone in the USA called them. Then you have a place here
to start looking....