Why We Get the Police State We Deserve—and What We Can Do to Fix That

[cali]

n the first flush of stories about how the National Security Agency is surveilling American citizens, one stomach-turning revelation hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves: we get the surveillance state we deserve because rank political partisanship trumps bedrock principle every goddamn time on just about every goddamn issue.

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In January 2006, Pew Research asked whether it was OK to collect info on “people suspected of involvement with terrorism by secretly listening in on telephone calls and reading emails between some people in the United States and other countries, without first getting court approval to do so.” A slim majority of all respondents—51 percent—said yes while 47 percent said no.

The partisan breakdown, however, was vastly different, with 75 percent of Republicans finding it acceptable and just 23 percent dissenting. When it came the Democrats, only 37 percent of Democrats signed off on NSA snooping, with a whopping 61 percent saying screw off.

<snip>

Fast-forward to June 2013, when a Democrat occupies the Oval Office after an easy reelection and his party controls the Senate. Pew asked respondents whether it’s OK that the NSA “has been getting secret court orders to track telephone calls of millions of Americans in an effort to investigate terrorism.” This time around, it’s Democrats who overwhelmingly support collecting collecting yottabytes and exabytes of metadata on us all, with 64 percent saying they are totally fine with NSA surveillance programs and a measly 34 percent disagreeing. Among Republicans, enthusiasm for eye-in-the-sky surveillance has taken a major hit, with only 52 percent agreeing and 47 percent saying no.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/11/why-we-get-the-police-state-we-deserve-and-what-we-can-do-to-fix-that.html

[emulatorloo]

1. The claims are Obama admin installed safeguards into the law, whereas we know Bush did nothing of

the sort.

Whether or not the safeguards are enough is a different debate. Whether the program should be there is another debate.

However, I think the increased congressional and judicial oversight that Admin says it has in place to prevent abuse complicates the author's assertion that this is a merely partisan response. People take in new info, process it and make up their own minds accordingly.