| > There are free and fair secret elections. Sorry, but I'm going to have to call bullshit on this one. Lobbying and uncapped campaign donations are tantamount to legalised bribery. The system is utterly corrupt. Free they may be, but calling them fair is a gross misrepresentation in my opinion. > I worry about the thought processes that must occur for people to think this; or similar things, like conflating an instance of some law enforcement department abusing its power with a totalitarian police state. We're not saying it's a police state. We're saying it is becoming one because of the very tools that these agencies possess and abuse without accountability. As an example, you've basically had a man (a criminal) James Clapper lie directly to congress knowingly and unabashedly. He's somehow still walking around, free and lol'ing at the general public he so joyously likes to mislead and scaremonger. > I worry about the thought processes that must occur for people to think this; or similar things. I honestly think the same of people who think that there is no problem here, nothing to worry about or even that it's a good thing. I honestly can't wrap my head around the immense wilfull ignorance some people seem to be displaying. It makes me sad, angry and disgusted all at once. |
Right, this is my problem. I have no problem with posession of these tools. States possess much worse things, nuclear weapons spring to mind. And abuse of these tools in an unaccountable fashion is wrong, 100% with you on that. However it is not clear to me that such abuses have occurred, or are occurring in a systematic way. Are there any documented (to the extent possible) cases of this? I didn't think even the Snowden documents showed that. In fact, it looked like they were full of caveats about US and UK citizen surveillance being a problematic area, and stated requirements for legal reviews and checks in these cases?