I'm slightly less worried that the NSA wants to optimize their interpretation of the constitution to catch bad guys than I am about how little effort it takes t

I'm slightly less worried that the NSA wants to optimize their interpretation of the constitution to catch bad guys than I am about how little effort it takes to push that interpretation through. To turn your comment around a little bit in a way that places responsibility on normal citizens or congresspeople instead of the NSA, it's inconvenient to disagree with authority, or deal with a lie, but once you start conceding rights or letting one branch of government lie to another, where do you stop? What's tolerated is encouraged, as most parents would suggest[0]. When this broke, a lot of people said "we already knew!" We did. But when you're explicitly confronted with something, you get to decide whether you're going to tolerate it or not. In fact, you have to - there's no way to not decide whether to tolerate something or not. 0. Incidentally, I wish we would start seeing ourselves as parents of a gov, if for no other reason than to not see ourselves as children.