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Congress and the NSA believe it is both constitutional and acceptable to collect and store any data they can get their hands on. They supposedly draw a fuzzy li
by natrius 13y ago
Congress and the NSA believe it is both constitutional and acceptable to collect and store any data they can get their hands on. They supposedly draw a fuzzy line to exclude most Americans when searching the stored data, but storing the communications of Americans is blatantly unconstitutional and dangerous for our democracy. It just takes one bad actor with access to that information to control elections and entire lives.
The idea that there are "not-so-big tweaks" that could be made to these programs is false if preserving privacy and democracy matters to you.
- diminoten 13y ago> storing the communications of Americans is blatantly unconstitutional and dangerous for our democracy Is it? > The idea that there are "not-so-big tweaks" that could be made to these programs is false if preserving privacy and democracy matters to you. So I'm either wrong or unamerican? Right.
- natrius 13y agoNo need to interpret ill will here. I clearly think you're wrong. The conditional there was to highlight the values I aim to protect that you likely share.
- diminoten 13y agoI was asking you to elaborate on why you think the storing of some of the communications of some Americans is a) blatantly unconstitutional and b) dangerous for our democracy. I'm also asking you why you think anyone who believes there are small changes we can make for the better is unamerican, or as you put it, "preserving privacy and democracy matters to you"?
- natrius 13y agoA plain reading of the Fourth Amendment clearly prohibits this sort of mass surveillance. Constitutional arguments tend to degenerate into semantic ones, so let's ignore that argument for now. The threat to privacy and democracy is that anyone with access to this data can blackmail anyone. The NSA is storing as much data as possible for as long as possible. This means they have the communications (metadata or otherwise) of every potential politician, and thus the ability to blackmail them to distort their decisions. We're told that there are safeguards in place to prevent such abuse, but those safeguards are secret, and I can't imagine any safeguards being foolproof. The best safeguard to protect our democracy is to not allow such a system to be built.