One thing that always bothers me is the assumption that we dislike the NSA because we're worried about them reading our personal emails and looking at our photo

One thing that always bothers me is the assumption that we dislike the NSA because we're worried about them reading our personal emails and looking at our photos, and.. "you know.. our Instagramming". We should know it's not about anyone going through the process of reading our communications, it's about having automated systems hooked up to them, keeping them, and having the ability to use them. The human and electronic pieces of this system can act on you and change your life, even without you ever knowing about it. Being hooked up to machines like this is losing a large part of our own power as a check and balance in our own government. We won't do it. If this program is "necessary" to fight terrorism, will i be considered a terrorist if i continue to disagree? What if i become very effective at disagreeing? I believe that most should not be very concerned because most are not sending email to intelligence targets. It's not just directly to intelligence targets. Can someone remind me what 3 hops from a base group of 117,000 targets is again? We're not talking about a home handwritten address book, this is linkedin, everyone i sold shit to on craigslist, everyone i've ever contacted. Heads per hop is like 100, at least. Anyway, should that group be concerned? The Agency is an intelligence organization, not a law enforcement agency. So what? Just because there's a boundary between the NSA and everyone else doesn't mean they aren't exploiting the same broken interpretation of Terry v Ohio to build systematic unreasonable-unarticulated-suspicion writ-of-assistance privacy violations. We disagree with the principle, not just the NSA. AT&T works directly with the CIA, the CIA works with the FBI, sharing on that side is just a cluster. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/data-sharing-law-enforcement-organised-chaos http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/data-sharing-la... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/07/us/cia-is-said-to-pay-att-for-call-data.html?_r=1& http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/07/us/cia-is-said-to-pay-att-... http://bordc.org/newsletter/2013/12/#data http://bordc.org/newsletter/2013/12/#data And I would prefer a world in which spying was unnecessary. But humanity is not there yet. No one disagrees that intelligence is necessary. We disagree with being wired up to management and machines that can (and always will) easily make mistakes. Privacy is a right, violating it to feed the machine is already diminishing us. I refuse to eat your mayo.