| > I'm also thinking long-long term. Terrorism isn't a seriously considerable risk to an individual American, but what about in 50 or 100 years? What if in the distant future, terrorist groups or weird death cults like Aum Shinrikyo are able to more easily develop or obtain biological or chemical weapons that can dissipate into a large urban area quickly? All the more reason to stop with band-aid solutions like spying on the entire world, and engage in real efforts to bring education, infrastructure, and stability to the regions most prone to creating terrorists. The NSA is part of a broader picture of US military and intelligence agencies that involves selling arms without oversight, overthrowing democratically elected governments, funding rebel groups that later become terrorists, congressionally unauthorized military action, a network of unscrupulous military contractors like Blackwater and Dyncorp, relationships with brutal regimes like Saudi Arabia, and political fear-mongering and propaganda in the US and abroad to afford a thin veil of legitimacy to these activities. You are scared of terrorism, and so is the other side. As one small example of many, did you know that during the "Shock and Awe" phase of the US invasion of Iraq, the Oxford Research Group estimates there were over 6,000 civilian deaths? [1] That's more than on 9/11 itself, and the implication of terrorism is literally in the name "Shock and Awe" as well as in the stated definition of this military doctrine: "Rapid Dominance would seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events so that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at tactical and strategic levels" [2] [1] https://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/reference/pdf/a_dossi... [2] http://www.dodccrp.org/files/Ullman_Shock.pdf |