That's a false dichotomy. If the NSA disappeared tomorrow we would not all be dead thanks to terrorists or whatever. Instead, the question is one of acceptabl

That's a false dichotomy. If the NSA disappeared tomorrow we would not all be dead thanks to terrorists or whatever. Instead, the question is one of acceptable risk. The concept of risk is something the American public has seemed to have completely forgotten about. The (anecdotally) general attitude that has evolved in America is one of pigeonholing things into black and white, of "zero tolerance" and "any risk is unacceptable", rather than one of rationally weighing the pros and cons of a complex, grey situation. One doesn't have to look very far back in history to see the massively life-crushing power a surveillance state can wield. Just look back 30 or 40 years--that might easily be in your own lifetime--to see the millions of lives worsened or even ended thanks to surveillance-based societies. America obviously isn't at that stage yet, but as Binney said, we're at the point where all it would take is to turn a key and we'd be there overnight. Compare that to the risk of what the NSA is purportedly protecting us against. Between 2007-2011 your chances of dying in a terrorist attack were 1 in 20 million [1]. Meanwhile the chance of dying in a car accident is 1 in 19,000; of drowning in a bathtub 1 in 800,000; of dying by getting hit by lighting 1 in 5.5 million. [2] How can we justify constructing a turnkey surveillance state to "protect" us against the risk of terrorism, while simultaneously not justifying constructing a global weather-control system to end the risk of lightning strikes? Or a nationwide ban on bathtubs to end the risk of bathtub drownings? Or shutting down all the freeways to end the risk of car accidents? We're all going to die somehow, and setting foot outside of your house carries a risk that a ladder might fall on your head, or that you'll slip in a puddle and break your neck. And yet we're totally OK with constructing the largest surveillance apparatus human history has ever seen to "protect" us against a 1 in 20 million chance that some lunatic will set off a bomb somewhere. How did our ability to assess and, most importantly, accept the reality of everyday risk go so completely bonkers? [1] http://swampland.time.com/2013/05/06/chances-of-dying-in-a-terrorist-attack-number/ http://swampland.time.com/2013/05/06/chances-of-dying-in-a-t... [2] http://reason.com/archives/2011/09/06/how-scared-of-terrorism-should http://reason.com/archives/2011/09/06/how-scared-of-terroris...