General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Re: Attacks on Snowden, Greenwald. How the fuck do people like that sleep at night? [View all]JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)I explain it quite well. The NSA and our government including our Congress and courts and executive are specifically prohibited by the Constitution from violating our innate right to privacy and to association. The NSA program limits our right of free association (First Amendment. Remember?)
The nonchalance with which Americans are now ceding the right to privacy will be paid for by our children and grandchildren.
It is very sad that Americans do not feel the increasingly hot water they are sitting in. The surveillance state will strangle our freedom like a python strangles its prey.
When I was a little girl, the woman who lived across the street from my grandmother sat at her window for hours during the day -- curtains drawn all except for a crack. The woman was spying on the world (unfortunately for my grandmother who was right across the street). She thought that no one could see her peering eyes through the crack, but of course, everyone could. She would have been a joke except that she was a terrible gossip and made up stories. People laughed at her. Today we would say that she was paranoid and mentally ill. That was small town America. A very nosy woman in small town America. The NSA is on the same level. Rather than get warrants as the Constitution requires, warrants based on probable cause and stating with specificity the items and places to be searched and seized, they have opened a sneaky crack in the curtain so that they can spy on, report on, and through their gossip control their neighbors and fellow countrymen.
That is shameful. It is paranoid.
Targeted policing is a different matter. Subpoenas and warrants are not hard to get. You just have to explain why you want them. When you get a subpoena or a warrant, there is a legal record, a paper trail that helps insure that you are obtaining the items and the information for a useful, legitimate reason.
The government does not publish the warrants or subpoenas before executing them. The government does not need this broad, overly broad surveillance program. It does not need to be snooping around secretly. It is doing it for nefarious reasons. If its reasons for looking at our phone bills and personal internet communications were valid and in the national interest, it would not be obtaining them in secret. It would use the constitutional methods. It would abide by the Constitution.
The NSA programs stink of corruption and illegality.