I would press Bamford into service as a proof, not a disproof, of my point. How far do you think COINTELPRO might have gone if the FBI had been able to record

I would press Bamford into service as a proof, not a disproof, of my point. How far do you think COINTELPRO might have gone if the FBI had been able to record every piece of mail, every conversation, had been able to lean on members of the press or members of the Church Committee with pre-recorded leverage, knowledge of every single questionable thing they'd done or said in 'private' all the way back to their childhood? ---- On August 17, 1975 Senator Frank Church stated on NBC's Meet the Press without mentioning the name of the NSA about this agency: “ In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology. I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.[9][10] " ---- The power we have handed these people is becoming orders of magnitude more extreme than the power it was technologically practical for an organization to attain in that era. That power is going to grow as time goes on. The danger is not that the NSA deploys hundreds of thousands of spies to inform on and suppress mainstream political opposition, the danger is that they don't have to, to exert effective control. We're going to need something stronger, not weaker, than the reforms implemented then, to be a durable deterrent to more severe abuses in the future. "Information wants to be free", said they. But that's not the case. The core of the idea is that information provides an incentive to everyone with access to that information, to use it. The greater the pile of information, the stronger the draw becomes. Eventually the amount of power concentrated in that information will corrupt whatever organizational structure we surround it with, so long as we permit it to be gathered in one place.