Comment It makes sense. (Score 1) 120
It makes sense, right? From the pov of the natsec people, these things help them secure the nation against potentially catastrophic attacks. From the pov of the LEOs , these represent the natural progression of tools they use to catch some pretty dangerous people, some of whom may also represent a significant danger to the nation, so why should they be deprived of their utility? Both sides can only be expected to strongly advocate for their side. You need 3rd party adjudication in this scenario.
In general, we need much more serious 3rd party involvement in all of this spy tech. The FISA court really is nothing but a rubber tamp composed of people who have very narrow real world experience but for whom 'the system' has never given the slightest hiccup on their , largely unearned rise to power. They're political hacks, appointees lifted into place because, well, someone has to be so lifted and they never rendered any offense and they expressed the right political opinions to the right people at the right time. They think the system is just dandy- worked for them!
We desperately need the NSA and the FBI to be doing their jobs with all the tech we can give them. Turf and tech wars WILL happen between well intentioned parties. That's a given. What we're missing is real, wise oversight and refereeing such that the public and both parties ultimately have real faith in the reasoning by those overseers. Really, the NSA scandal is scandal of the FISA court process. It's composed of intellectual lightweights and cowards and a few rich little girls whose chief unconscious guiding principle is they want BigMen to protect them so they can go on living their posh lives, feted and paid attention to by the powerful at clinking cocktail parties because, hey, that's what civilization is about.
Get judge Richard Posner in there. Get some people who have well considered povs and a well developed sense of statesmanship and what it means to be a nation of people, rights, laws, threats and tradeoffs needed to make it all work.
Of course LE grabs for everything it can. If it were your job, so would 99,999 out of 100,000 of you too. The kind of reticence and carefulness to maximizing your own advantage at the cost of some encroachment of an abstraction like civil liberties does not exist in enough people to populate the NSA so that the jobs get done. It's just not many hmans are. Thats why we have to look to oversight. Get some hardcore civil libertarians and hardcore natsec hawks into the process. It will work itself out. The civil libertarians will come to see that the worst form of civil rights violation is everyone is dead, and the natsecs will come to see that a nation that devoles into a version of 1984 is not a goal worth protecting, in fact, just the opposite.
As it is, the executive looks for every fakey boo hoo slip of the tongue reason to jail or administratively silence just the people whose pov we need as input in oversight and the civil libertarians are just clueless wrt to the seriouness of the threats we face and conclude , wrongly, that the NSA has gone mad with power and has installed the Constitution as toilet paper in their bathrooms. It's a failure to maintain the necessary diversity of opinions and a failure of wise adjudication of those opinions. That's our problem.
