Comment Re:Don't worry... (Score 1) 500
Absolutely. Working so very, very well that they can, I'm sure, easily winnow it out from the fact that you recently got HIV from your neighbor's husband and are trying hard to keep it from your two wives and the insurance company you are trying to get a huge life insurance policy from so that if your reckless skydiving hobby or the gang you work for as a drug mule kill you, your thirteen children, ten of them illegitimate-r, won't all starve, information that they would never ever use against you unless, of course, it suited them to do so because, for example, you were openly exposing their secrets or calling for the limitation of their powers on the Internet.
Which is a good thing, because if, say, all of this extra surveillance power was useful only against the criminally stupid non-terrorist private citizen because a) there isn't enough bandwidth in the Universe to monitor all the bandwidth of the Universe (God has the same problem, BTW) and b) contrary to popular belief, it is really simple to send encrypted messages that the NSA cannot detect or, if they detect, crack and terrorists -- even ones that are stuck in the 15th century as far as their religious ideals are concerned -- are not that stupid and have access to all the tools needed to secure lines of communication, the spook-lords might take it into their heads to notice that the only real difference between a spook and a terrorist is that the spook has nicer things and a 403k and dental.
So they could always, I dunno, stage a terrorist attack in such a way that it got blamed on some hapless Muslim who is inconveniently outspoken and who communicates with his elderly mother in Syria on his cell phone (oops, I mean communicates with his "mother" in Syria, wink wink nod nod know what I mean) or arrange for you to have an accident (I mean an "accident") driving home to work to kiss your wives and deliver a load of cocaine to the Peachy Blister street gang in your neighborhood.
Sure, I know, paranoid government conspiracy ravings, and there is nothing to have stopped them from doing most of this before 9/11 and the Patriot act but a certain amount (we hope) of genuine attachment to the ideals of America beyond the letter of the law and the letter of the law and possibility of consequences if caught at it. I feel every bit as comfortable about it as I used to feel with humans with imperfect brains, sociopathies, gambling debts, and blackmailable secrets sitting on top of nuclear weapons with the means at hand to immediately deliver them and detonate them.
Oh, wait, did you say that those days haven't really ended, and that somewhere out there is a young man with undiagnosed bipolar disorder whose wife just left him for another woman managing a locker full of nukes just begging to be used to columbine the two of them and a few dozen square miles in all directions of their -- I mean his -- house?
Time to honey-badger it. What we don't know, can't hurt us. Which is what most of us do, lest we go mad.
And hey, they could be genuine patriots, right? Observe everything but reveal nothing that ought not to be seen no matter how illegal, immoral, extortable it is, as long as it isn't "terrorism"? All without any sort of real accountability or audit?
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