On Friday, December 27, 2013 7:49:50 PM UTC-5, nestork wrote:
Daring Dufas: Hypocrite TeaBillie on welfare;3173130 Wrote:

He also mentioned the GOP are assholes and full of ****.



To be perfectly honest, I expect most Americans don't care if the NSA

has a record of their phone calls. The NSA is not interested in Mr.

Smith's extramarital affair with Miss Jones or whether Dweeble wants to

buy an ounce of pot this weekend.


The counter argument to that is the recent experience with the IRS.
The IRS should have no interest in whether an organization is
conservative or liberal, yet they targeted the Tea Party, for apparently
political reasons. Also, if you recall back to the days of Nixon,
what Nixon thought was a legitimate natioal interest included IRS
audits of opponents, wire tapping, break-ins, etc. Also, we know
that Hoover had the FBI doing all kinds of illegal acts, like wire
tapping Martin Luther King. If either of those or someone similar
had controlof that number database, they certainly could and would
have used it to delve into the subjects on your list, if it suited
their purposes.

I'm torn on this issue myself. I see both sides of the argument.
Part of the problem is we don't know and for security reasons can't
know how much benefit this logging of all calls has been. If it's
been of marginal benefit, then it would seem it's not worth the
intrusion. If it's been a major benefit, which govt official claim,
then it's probably worth it, but some special rules need to be in
place. Access to the data should be carefully controlled and it
should require a court order with a specific justifiable reason
to access it each time data is needed. Of course the access
control the NSA is capable of has been demonstrated by Snowden.
All it took was a 20 something network tech to get into a huge
amount of their most secret info.






Since 9-11, there have been quite a

few terrorist attacks foiled, and the perps arrested before they had a

chance to put their plan into action. Most Americans would consider

that to be a success, and if they have to give up the right to total

privacy on their telephones, then most would make that sacrifice if it

means continued success and ultimately, safety.



The Supreme Court acknowledged as much by calling the NSA phone

monitoring the "counter punch" to terrorism.









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nestork