| > I think this would put them in a position of significant leverage over anyone who is ever elected president. Worse than that, it gives them the ability to identify and eliminate threats to their power before they can even get to the point where they could build a viable campaign for the presidency! That kind of power, along with access to information on any petty rival, or even just the nudes of the random but sexy person they met in passing the other day, is temptation enough to corrupt anyone. Even if we could assume it hasn't been abused to that extent so far (and we've already learned about many many abuses) there's nothing stopping it from happening in the future. One my earliest concerns with the NSA collecting all of this data is that with the president at the top of the chain of command I expected every president would abuse this power for themselves. That Bush Jr would use it to target his personal enemies, that Obama would do the same, and I think it's safe to say that Trump wouldn't have been able to show restraint if he had any access to it, but we saw how Trump had to press people in foreign countries to dig up dirt on his enemies. While I've seen some claims that Trump's access was more limited than it was for other presidents (due to his unstable behavior) I suspect no president has been given access to the massive amounts of data being collected and stored by the NSA, even though (officially) nothing could stop a sitting president from ordering it. While it could just be true that no president has ever tried, it might also be true that in practice those presidents had less authority over the NSA than the NSA had over them and so the NSA could simply tell them "no". |