Here's yet another article on HN designed to create a room full of screaming nerds. For the record, I'm a libertarian and _very_ concerned with our increasing

Here's yet another article on HN designed to create a room full of screaming nerds. For the record, I'm a libertarian and _very_ concerned with our increasing lack of privacy, anonymity, and the security state we are creating. Having said that, 1) Please put the year in the title 2) Note the difference between domestic intelligence and domestic criminal work. Intelligence is concerned with patterns of behavior. If you can demonstrate that citizens who read X have a 10 times greater likelihood to do something violent, it may be in the state's interest to keep track of that information. This has nothing to do with state harassment or living in a security state: your local sheriff probably does something very similar and has done so for centuries. Police are expected to gather random pieces of trivia to try to reasonably predict if bad things are happening or are going to occur. (This is why such interviews are confidential -- and also why they are politically-charged.) 3. Please be aware that you are having your chains yanked -- a story told with the intention of making you emotionally respond -- and act accordingly. 4. You can only consume so much of this before it rots your brain. Yes, things are bad -- but they are not bad because people you agree with are able to write emotionally-charged articles implying police harassment. As I've demonstrated, it's way too easy to do this. Ad infinitum. They are bad because we create centralized control systems and rules for everybody, then herd the population through as if they were so much cattle. (TSA, voice monitoring of overseas calls, etc) In some cases these rules are probably appropriate. In some (most) cases not, but by forcing officials to choose one way or another, at the national level, majorities slowly and continually tyrannize minorities, just in different topic areas. It's the system that is broken, not some poor FBI schmucks having to go out and question some random guy over his reading habits.