NSA Surveillance Abuses

I'm not sure how to get this through to you; but let's try.Imagine that every time you go through airport security, a full body scan is made of your kids and wife and they are sent around to a thousand or so unknown people (most of whom aren't even directly employed by the government) for salacious reasons or to be mocked. Now, there's a law that protects your kids scans from being sent anywhere (like HIPPA for doctors!), but incidentally it's a government institution

This "newspeak" with regard to government activity (and the intelligence apparatus especially) bothers me. It enables soundbites where government officials can say things like "no, we don't collect X", with essentially no real repurcussions by the other (legislative, judicial) branches of government that are supposed to keep them in check.You can see some discomfort with this status quo in some of the questions that people like Senator Wyden pose to officials from the

This is false. Check out the D-Notice system (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSMA-Notice) and note there are very recent examples of government interference, notably during Snowden's leaks and the Skripal affair.

Didn’t Snowden reveal that government agencies routinely break the law?

Snowden unveiled a horrifying truth about our government: widespread surveillance has been combined with a class of officials who do not face consequences for breaking the law. I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that the Constitution is facing an existential threat. Normally I would be sympathetic to the view that politics should stay off HN. But this feels different. I would hope that people wouldn't self-censor their counter-arguments, however. The possibility that things aren

> My position is de-facto true - if it weren’t, after the Snowden leaks (among others), the next round of representatives/President would have as their top issue disbanding the NSA/CIA no? As freedom from an abusive gov’t surveillance apparatus would have to be a major concern!So you have no evidence. You're just vaguely gesturing towards the lack of something.No smoking gun. No causal link.And you dare call this a de facto true stance?> Or at least

In this instance, doesn't the FBI have the power to make it illegal to know more details? That was always one of the major weaknesses of the unhinged post-9/11 reforms. Easily abused powers with insufficient checks and no effective channels to uncover abuse. If someone is capable of believing that reform is necessary they'll have to come up with an opinion on the subject without concrete details. James Clapper has a proud record of literally lying to Congress in order to cover up

There is some good reporting here by the Washington Post about the circumstances of Clapper's testimony to Congress. Readers here who know my comments know that I'm not fully happy with how Snowden chose to disclose information from inside NSA, and particularly not about his travel to China (Hong Kong) and Russia, but I think Snowden raises a fair point here. There is some genuine difference of opinion among Americans about how Clapper's statement to Congress should be characteriz

I think you're focusing on the wrong thing. It doesn't really matter if it's legal or constitutional, because if it's not then they'll change the laws or reinterpret them in a new way or write a new Patriot Act.What we should focus on is whether a government should be allowed to operate in secrecy, without any public oversight or knowledge, and whether the government can be morally justified in surveilling citizens without probable cause.

I agree with this in principle, but in the US the intelligence/police don't really seem to be accountable to the people.They regularly conduct surveillance on huge scales and no one even knows about it until we get lucky with a leak like Snowden. Who knows how many dozens of other secrets like that they still have. The CIA/FBI etc. have a history of doing this kind of thing for decades, at least since WW2. Then it gets declassified 50 years later when no one cares.Surveillan