> That's counterproductive, because it's very bad PR in the long run. You're saying that the government is still using the data to enforce political domination

> That's counterproductive, because it's very bad PR in the long run. You're saying that the government is still using the data to enforce political domination, and the only reason they're not murdering people is that it's more efficient and sustainable to use other tactics. That may be so. I'd regard it as kind of orthogonal to the point I was making; nevertheless, let's see... I would argue that the COINTELPRO approach is less bad than the gulag approach, in a few ways. (a) Less damage is inflicted on individuals' lives. (b) It seems chancy; there will be some "politically inconvenient" leaders who just happen to be squeaky clean, and maybe all available methods of discrediting them would look highly suspicious and reveal the FBI's hand, and they just have to let it through. (c) One aspect of the approach is that the fact that anything is happening is hidden from the general public. This necessarily means that (most) people are not being intimidated away from the politically undesirable view; whereas with purges, people learn to shut up for fear of their lives. If some ideas or arguments are intrinsically appealing to the people, it seems they will spread inevitably, even if public proponents of them mysteriously keep ending their careers in scandal; and eventually there will be enough proponents that the FBI can't take them all down. It feels like there are fundamental limits to this kind of repression; it's less scary and final than the domination backed by purges. The NSA do have a scary amount of power, probably more than any branch of government--e.g. they could probably decide the presidential election by revealing some choice secrets and discrediting the undesired candidates--but it seems limited. If they use it too much, they'll lose it, which they don't want and will act to avoid. I am interested in knowing about what they get up to--and part of my assumption is that the NSA's operations are limited by their need to maintain a mostly-plausible public pretense of no significant political manipulation of their own country, lest a public backlash destroy them; which requires that there be suspicious and watchful citizens like you, ready to get angry at the NSA. I simply object to the notion that there is no significant difference between the FBI's operations and killing hundreds of thousands of political undesirables. We are better than that, and it is important that we remain that way.