I've noticed a particularly troubling trend among my friends who are rabidly partisan. Now that some of these privacy issues are out in the open, there's a desp

I've noticed a particularly troubling trend among my friends who are rabidly partisan. Now that some of these privacy issues are out in the open, there's a desperation to pin it on the other party. Just to be clear: as another commenter said, I don't give a rat's ass if the court consists of the greatest figures in western science. We don't do secret courts. It's a serious mistake trying to turn this into the usual one party versus the other thing. The U.S. got here because of systemic problems; the system itself has been set up in a bad way. The qualities of the people involved -- their party affiliation, their tax return status, whether they like cats or not -- that's all bullshit. And we should call bullshit on folks who try to change the subject in this manner. I'll go even farther. I like the NSA. I think they do a great job, I think they have some of the smartest people working in government right now, and I think the country owes a humongous amount of gratitude towards them. If anything, these guys are my heroes. But that doesn't make the NSA spying right. If you tell the NSA to do fucked up stuff, and you set up a system where they are encouraged and promoted for doing fucked up stuff, you're going to have an agency full of awesome people working as hard as they can to do fucked up stuff. They're not supposed to guide national intelligence gathering -- the policy, structure, and ethics are created by congress and the president -- they're the ones executing it. If we want to fix what's wrong, we're going to need to get our head out of our asses in regards to which team is better than the other and start talking about structural changes that can bring intelligence gathering back in line to where it's supposed to be.