> I wasn't trying to say that at all. I am all for limiting the government's ability to subpoena or access data collected by companies about us. If we allow the

> I wasn't trying to say that at all. I am all for limiting the government's ability to subpoena or access data collected by companies about us. If we allow the government to use wide nets to try to catch criminals, they are going to catch innocent people, and that is bad. I think your trust in laws is naive. A law doesn't self-enforce. The mere existence of a law does not limit de-facto power. You can not limit an entity's power by telling it that it is required to limit its own power. That might make exercising the power illegal, but it does not take away the actual power. And you don't have to look particularly far back into history to see how governments don't care about enforcing laws against themselves when that would limit their power. A lot of the things the NSA has been doing was illegal--did that stop them from doing it? No. As a matter of fact, they could eavesdrop on google's fibers, so they did, whether legal or not. If you really want to limit the power, you have to use technical measures that actually remove the power.