And the NSA can do all sorts of surveillance not available to the police. Big deal. You are missing the point. The precise techniques used are not important here. What is important is who is watching the watchmen. I don't give a damn THAT the NSA is listening and generally don't care much HOW. I do however care about WHO they are listening to and WHY and most importantly WHAT is preventing them from abusing their power. A secretive organization operating a secret program to to spy on unknown parties under secret directives which is overseen by a secret court that issues secret rulings is not what I would call accountable.

Quite frankly I have FAR more to fear from the NSA than I do from any terrorist. My government has a very recent history of torturing individuals, indefinite imprisonment without trial, targeted assassinations, justification of doing so again US citizens, "extraordinary rendition" and more.

That is NOT even remotely clear. We don't know what the NSA is targeting. We know barely any meaningful details and none appear forthcoming. We also have no transparent oversight. The only thing that is clear is that we don't know very much and that is what is worrying. An unaccountable government agency is a very dangerous thing.

You do realize that is EXACTLY how David Petraus (the former head of the CIA) was caught cheating on his wife, right? If it is online, it can be seen. Only an idiot would think an unsent draft in a gmail account was somehow secure against anything.

That is an incredibly naive view of how things work. If these bad guys truly are so dumb that they would only secure their communications if we admit we are listening to them then it should be very easy to find them. Some of them may be that stupid but any of them worth worrying about probably are not. They KNOW the NSA is listening and it's not hard to guess how they might be doing it. That does not however mean that the NSA has a right to hide that fact from the very people they are supposed to protect. NOTHING is gained by keeping the mere existence of this program secret and there MUST be some means by which the actions of the NSA are made accountable to the citizens.

It is vastly different because the NSA is monitoring ME without probable cause. I don't give a crap if my 4th amendment rights are inconvenient for the NSA. They are there because power gets abused if left unchecked.

It can be done. What you do is give him challenges that his powers and decency are limited to help. How does he stop us from killing each other for example? How does he protect us from our own bad decisions? How does he protect other species from humans when we are behaving badly?

Put him in situations where there is no obviously correct moral choice. You humanize him. Heck make him a bad guy for a while.

You have a guy who is something close to perfect and yet seeks to be "normal" among us imperfect humans. Why? What are the consequences? There has to be some interesting tension and character development somewhere in there.

Please tell me that pun was intentional...

Cute. Of course people respond wildly differently depending on exactly what question is being asked. "Do you support killing terrorists?" will get a much higher positive response than "Do you support violating your civil rights so that we can kill terrorists more easily?" I can find surveys with just slightly different phrasing of the questions that will have much different results. Don't get too excited by one survey with misleading results. Some people support using torture too but that doesn't make it acceptable.

That's a better than a Star Chamber. Plus just because a bunch of people are saying the same thing does not mean they are wrong. The NSA and by extension our elected officials have overstepped their authority and have tried to hide what they are doing. I do not trust them nor do I trust their explanations. They have clearly lied to us and in my opinion have violated the law. I don't think what they have done is legal nor should it be legal so long as everything is held as a secret.

Hardly. You and I are both well aware that our police regularly do covert surveillance of suspected criminals. The fact that they do so is public knowledge and we are fine with that. While it is sometimes necessary to temporarily hide the tactical details of a specific surveillance, it is not necessary to hide the existence of the program to do so or to hide the findings of such surveillance indefinitely. Furthermore the authorization for such surveillance is overseen by reasonably transparent judicial review, it typically limited in scope and time frame and the results of the surveillance are revealed to the public in due course.

The NSA on the other hand has a system where they have a secret program, with secret directives, overseen by a secret court, whose findings are kept secret. Though many suspected the NSA was conducting surveillance of some sort, the very existence of this program was kept secret from the public. At no point in this system does the public have any means by which to be notified of abuses of this system. The entire progress is treated as a secret and hidden effectively forever from public scrutiny. No reasonable person has a problem with the idea of our government looking for bad guys but the methods used matter greatly and not all methods are acceptable. This is EXACTLY like the end of the movie "A Few Good Men" where the government is screaming at us that we can't handle the truth and that they do not have to explain themselves to us. Cheesy as that sounds, it is a perfect analogy to what is going on here.

And who controls the key to this so called lock box? What accountable party keeps them from unauthorized use? The FISA court isn't accountable. Neither is the administration or congress since they do not publish their findings. By what method does the public find out about abuses of this system?

Big deal. Nobody calls these days anyway. What about the rest of the phone meta-data? Emails? Text messages? Facebook? Twitter?

So we have a secret program with secret directives reviewed by a secret court whose findings are secret. Gee, why am I not reassured? [/sarcasm]

Last time I checked homicide will result in a rather lengthy jail sentence. Do you really think someone is going to risk a life sentence for get a copyright put in the public domain? I can be pretty pessimistic about people sometimes but wow...

I don't recall any inalienable right to a large inheritance. What about the kids who didn't win the genetic lottery and were born to the "wrong" parents?

Why? They didn't create anything. They didn't contribute anything. It wasn't their work or their creativity. Let them contribute their own works and get rewarded for them.

I'll be dead so frankly I doubt I'll care very much.

What you are referring to is the protection of the owners of the company from personal liability (in most cases) for the actions of the company. That's the basic reason for a corporation to exist and it is super important. It's not an exaggeration to say that it is the basis for our entire economy. However as it is structured it often eliminates too much accountability. Management can direct the company to engage in activities that would put them in jail were they to engage in those same activities without the protection of the corporate veil. If I as an individual drop poison in a river and harm someone, I am going to jail. If an individual does so under the aegis of a corporation, chances are that they won't even see the inside of a courtroom.

The corporate veil is an important legal protection and I support it strongly. However I also believe that if an individual engages in activities which would be criminal outside of the corporation, then their liability shield should be subject to possible revocation much more easily than it is presently. While I understand why, it floors me that after the financial meltdown of 2008 or after the BP oil spill that essentially no one has been tried in a court of law despite there being ample evidence of malfeasance.

No limited enough unfortunately. Corporations are allowed to behave quite badly compared with natural persons.

Actually it doesn't even matter whose word we take because the important bit is that the activities of the NSA are now public knowledge. It is impossible to have a debate about the balance of security and civil rights if our civil rights are taken away in secret. To all appearances the NSA has lied to the American people about the scope, method and possibly purpose of their activities.

I find it astonishing that they think that we would be ok with them gathering data on everyone in secret, storing and analyzing it indefinitely, while being supposedly overseen by a secret "court" which is equally unaccountable. The administration who is in charge of the NSA is basically making the argument that "we passed a law so it is legal" despite having never withstood independent judicial review. No one could challenge the NSA in court because it is impossible to prove standing or harm against something that you cannot prove exists. Congress won't do anything about it for fear of appearing weak on national security during their next election campaign.

That's not a reasonable argument. That is merely a statement of the status quo. So my original statement stands. I have never seen a reasonable argument for why post-mortem copyrights should last as long as they do.

Then I would suggest that those exist only if explicitly provided for in the will of the author. Perhaps JRR Tolkien did not want the Silmarilion published. If the author wants their works to be continued they can transfer the copyright prior to or upon their death. I see no reason for this to be an automatic process. As it stands we often have estates sitting on works that rightfully should be in the public domain where they can be worked on by people other than the estate of the author. Tolkien's children are no more deserving than you are as far as being able to create derivative works of a deceased author.

In any case 50 years after the author is dead is an ABSURD amount of time for someone to benefit from someone elses work. There is no reasonable argument I can think of for post-mortem copyrights to last that long.

Easily solved. If the individual dies of anything other than natural causes the work immediately become public domain at the time of their death.

An excellent question. If the association (a corporations) has the rights of a person should it not also have the responsibilities of one?

Employees typically are not the owners of the corporation. They are members of the association but by definition only shareholders are the owners. Employees can be shareholders but frequently are not.