This is what I was talking about. Hasn't it ever occurred to you that the government could easily silence your anti-government rants (and those of others such as Alex Jones) if it had this kind of surveillance but mysteriously hasn't? Meanwhile, should I expect a van to show up and put a bullet through my head if I criticize Obama?
I'll just say right now that his stimulus package was stupid and failed, and he isn't doing anything to stop the racism his party has already made required by public schools. Let's see what happens "when" the government reads what I just wrote after it wades through quadrillions of other messages on the Internet.
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Yeah, but what does that have to do with what I just asked? You can't claim to know how many terrorist attacks (if any) have been thwarted by TOP SECRET government agencies.
Note: I know this is long, but I'm very curious about how people feel about what I have to say as this is a personal subject.
I only caught your rebuttal to these arguments, and I've got to say we share the same sentiments. Coming from a family entrenched in the intelligence community, I sort of grew up with the understanding that this sort of oversight, this type of government "spying" was a matter of national security and somewhat of a necessity. I guess none of this comes as a shock to me, since it has been going on since before I was born (as I was told). The government is just utilizing the technology that's available to the best of their abilities now, much as we allowed. That doesn't make it bad, that doesn't make it good. It's just the norm.
After 9/11, we allowed the government (and by government I mean much more specifically the national intelligence community) into our lives a little more, hoping that they would act responsibly and be held to the highest of standards in their efforts to combat, well, enemy combatants to the US. That also came with the added responsibility of ensuring us that we as a people had some semblance of privacy even though the "government" (I.E. at the national security level, a group of well vetted individuals who are deemed upstanding, responsible, and forthright in their actions) was the sole entity allowed to "breach" it. I can tell you firsthand that the people who are collecting and analyzing this information, are not of the same genetic makeup as the ones making Star Trek spoofs and wasting taxpayer money. They do their job, and they have no concern for the average citizens social life or daily meanderings (which, if you're reading this, probably means you) except to protect it. The few that are put in that position are there to help the average person, not hurt. And very few of them are stupid, very few of them have intentions to sabotage average lives with the information and power they're given.
A big reason for some of these oversight policies is to weed out irregular activity and take a look at it before deeming it unworthy (since even the majority of irregular activity is not a threat to the US) and throwing it into a filter that ensures it doesn't come back again (like when someone says "That's the bomb" and isn't inferring an explosive device intended to kill people, but rather that someone's Air Max 95s are sick).
The phone records that the government wants are a byproduct of wanting to alleviate some of the red-tape involved in trying to thwart real-time threats. By requiring a warrant and a subpoena for certain things (like a terrorist changing the location of a bombing because he feels the authorities have caught up to him), the government is very limited in their ability to act with the speed that the internet, or terrorists/bad guys/whatever you wanna call them do or does. It's a game of cat and mouse to protect people, and when it comes to major threats like terrorist attacks that aren't lone wolves, but are ones enacted by other military organizations against the United States (like 9/11), the intelligence community is the only group with the resources to help thwart these attacks quickly and effectively. But Intel has to abide by laboring laws of the general populace that serve a HUGE purpose in the general populace, but not in wartime against warriors.
(It's why there's a separate court for the intel community, because the two disagree so often and the standards are different. The intelligence community is at war against people with war funds and expertise, not petty theft crooks)
The intelligence communities rules are bound to an archaic (albeit in MOST cases effective) judicial system that doesn't allow for real-time response to save people's lives. Warrants take time, subpoenas take time, lives get lost in the process. You think the people that harm you are functioning with a restrictive government to look out for? No, they're operating in a free-ish society where just about anyone could walk onto the metro and obliterate the place because it's actually a pretty free society. The government already having the data to sift through in certain scenarios ensures that they'll probably still be playing catch up, but the head start that "terrorists" get won't be as huge.
It doesn't even mean that this whole wire/data tapping thing is right or necessary, it's just that I don't understand why it is that NOW people are upset by it. The information about the Patriot Act was readily available upon it's signing; where were the complaints then? Then, when news reports broke about how impacting the legislation that their elected congressmen/women had signed was, where were the revolts?
Even after 9/11, when I was a boy, I remember people talking about the cost of security, and how much people were willing to give up, being discussed at my house. Republicans and Democrats felt the effects of that attack, and neither side nor the general populace wanted it to happen again. That's where a lot of this stems from. And if this information hadn't been leaked and was rather discussed in an open forum, I think things probably wouldn't be as nuts as they are now. Allow a little logic and a full scope of detail and circumstance to affect your opinion, not a rapid "Blame Bush! Blame Obama!" mentality. It's kind of silly.
A quick edit that I wanted to add on to further extrapolate on the point I'm trying to get across. Even if we consider every.single.person that these policies and oversight directly affected, it makes up less than 1% of the entire US population. For 99% of the people moving about the United States, they will feel absolutely no effects from this except being more acutely aware of the policy now. Nothing is going to change from yesterday. People's anti-government blogs can still function, MSNBC will still be able to sprout off at the mouth, Alex Jones/Rush Limbaugh will still go on his tirades as will Alex Plant. Nothing changes, you're still as free as you can be in a society that has a government constantly trying to ensure that random massive attacks aren't carried out daily against citizens like in war-torn countries. (As an aside, with lone wolf terrorists and murders going on killing sprees, they're just now finding out how difficult that can be).
You could argue that the government should have said something about it, but I can argue just as much that the mass hysteria involved in not having an open, unbiased forum in which to explain their reasoning behind enacting these policies is the exact reason why they didn't.
