[amerika_blog]

I support the NSA monitoring.

No, not a troll.

At this point, the USA has a ton of enemies. Filtering through emails, phone, etc. is a good way to catch these. We need to give law enforcement the tools it needs.

Seeing how this access was abused to hunt down Tea Party groups convinces me that the NSA needs to be de-politicized, not shut down.

I think we'll find that this monitoring is inevitable because the technology is there and also, since the technology is there, if it is not used and a terrorist incident occurs, people will be held responsible for NOT using it.

[GVIrish]

For one, the United States has a ton of enemies because of dirty and mean things we have done to other countries. Maybe if we fixed our foreign policy and stopped dropping bombs on poor people there'd be less people that hate us. That would be a lot simpler than making people hate us more by spying on them, installing backdoors in encryption standards, spending billions of dollars on said spying, not having proper auditing of said spying, and putting our democracy at risk due to said spying.

As for the monitoring preventing a terrorist attack:

A. As of yet they have not been able to demonstrate that they have successfully prevented an attack based on information they gained through the NSA. The best they could show was that they arrested some taxi cab driver in California who sent $8500 to some militants.

B. Even if the massive spying prevented some attacks, you have to ask, "at what cost?" This type of unaccountable intelligence apparatus has the very real potential to undermine our democracy and turn the United States into a police state. In some ways that is already happening. And if you get too far down the road towards an authoritarian government, some humanities worst atrocities await.

Terrorists may have killed thousands in the last century, but murderous governments have killed 10's of millions, potentially over 100 million. And I'm not talking about war, I'm talking about state-sanctioned murder. I'd rather take my chances with the occassional nutjob with a pressure cooker than an oppressive government .

[GVIrish]

I'm not saying we need to get rid of the NSA completely, but it should be dramatically curbed and it should have a lot more independent and transparent oversight. From the get-go dragnet spying on Americans should be ended.

[dalke]

> "Filtering through emails, phone, etc. is a good way to catch these."

There has not been evidence that the benefits of doing the search outweigh the costs to a free society. For an example quote from this case, p62 of the court opinion:

"Given the limited record before me at this point in the litigation - most notably, the utter lack of evidence that a terrorist attack has ever been prevented because searching the NSA database was faster than other investigative tactics - I have serious doubts about the efficacy of the metadata collection program as a means of conducting time-sensitive investigations in cases involving imminent threats of terrorism."

If you have any evidence that the NSA domestic telephone metadata gathering has been effective at catching enemies of the US, then I'm sure the courts would love to hear from you. Since the government has not presented that information, I am certain that you do not have any evidence that "filtering .. is a good way to catch these."

> "if it is not used and a terrorist incident occurs, people will be held responsible for NOT using it"

Well, yes. That's why we have laws and court cases - to define where those limits are.

If someone shoots and murders someone else, then there can be the cry "let's ban all guns!", but the 2nd amendment prevents that. If a newspaper wants to print secret documents which show that the president "systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress", then the 1st amendment can prohibit the government from getting a prior restraint injunction.

This is all about giving a reason for why the NSA or other organization is NOT responsible - because doing so would be against the law.

[dragonwriter]

> At this point, the USA has a ton of enemies. Filtering through emails, phone, etc. is a good way to catch these.

Evidence for this claim?

[frostmatthew]

> the USA has a ton of enemies

The writers of our Constitution specifically enumerated the rights we have so that they couldn't be taken away for the sake of security. Liberty is more important than security and it is the government's responsibility to provide the latter without trampling on the former.