[snowwrestler]

No. Job #1 for a national government is national security, and governments inherently have the power to intrude upon privately operated companies.

I think that in the long run, the U.S. is still a good place to keep data.

U.S. citizens have an instinctual distrust of government that Europeans often mock, but in this case I think is an advantage.

In addition the U.S. has some of the strongest protections for freedom of expression in the world, which means that everyone can learn and argue openly about intel programs and other sub-topic of freedom vs. security.

[derefr]

> Job #1 for a national government is national security, and governments inherently have the power to intrude upon privately operated companies.

I would say that job #1 of a government is establishing and enforcing domestic property rights (to allow an economy to function); and job #2 is building public-good infrastructure like roads.

"National security" is job #1 of an organism interested in its own survival--but there's no reason a government needs to be such a thing; the only reason I can see for it is the precedent set by monarchies, where each current king wants the government to persist in its current form so that they themselves will stay in control of it. A government could run a country perfectly capably while leaving itself undefended from being "eaten" by a foreign government (or populist coup) at any time.

[DannoHung]

National Security is intrinsically about enforcing domestic property rights. It covers issues like terrorism but also foreign hostilities. Don't be a doof and pretend that National Security doesn't at least start with the interests of the citizens in mind. Seems like it gets awfully lost in the woods, but you can't pretend that if people just had the right ideals things would be fine.

[zxcdw]

Yes, that's what I too think right now in June 2013, although I am an European. But... How about in the future, considernig the progress towards a surveillance state which began around after 9/11 and Patriot Act? (And some say it began even earlier, but was greatly accelerated by Patriot Act)

The progress seems to be to give up individual liberties and freedoms in the name of War on Terror. Because the changes are incremental, people don't quite realize the progress until it is too late. By then, they consider it a status quo and youngsters don't even know what they are missing. It's the so-called boiling frog analogy.

[mpyne]

Except that even in the U.S. it has literally been much worse, even before computers. We have always had an ebb-and-flow with civil liberties.

First we enslaved the blacks, then we started making them free. Then we made a slave control law to forcibly rendition captured slaves back to their masters in the slave states. Then we fought and died and FREED THE SLAVES!.... except that we didn't, as it turns out. Reconstruction was a high-water mark, then Jim Crow and the KKK came.

Hell, we didn't even start off from a great place. Go read about the Alien and Sedition Acts when you get a chance.

And likewise with privacy rights. We didn't start off with those either. As long as the government didn't have to search you or your property to find something, it was fair game. But then we added controls for postal mail. Then telephones, and eventually cell phones, beepers, and more. We also had the Supreme Court essentially create "reasonable expectation of privacy" out of whole cloth (which I don't blame them for, but goes to show how we didn't start off with Jefferson's dream government just to beat back all the attackers over time).

Of course in between there were COINTELPRO, FBI watchlists, HUAC & McCarthy's red scare, J. Edgar Hoover (which even MULTICS referenced, IIRC), ECPA, CALEA, attempts at the Clipper chip, munitions controls on crypto, etc. etc.

So it hasn't all been consistent progress but it also hasn't all been consistent withdrawal. So while I respect and greatly admire those who fight for increased privacy because they think it's the right thing to do, I can only assume those who characterize civil liberties in the U.S. as something that has simply been slowly eroded over time have not studied as much U.S. history as they should have.