Alright, you got me: I responded to a comment without reading the article. Having now read the fear-mongering article myself, I'm far more confident in my position. They're collecting info on non-citizens, like I said. Since you can't tell whether somebody's a citizen without doing the scan, they do the next best thing and discard citizens' data after the fact. Yes, they don't rule out watching everyone later, and we should fight that, but that's not what's happening now.

> I get that you have a political agenda

Not everyone who disagrees with you is a shill, and personal attacks remain unconvincing.

> but I wish you could at least soldier through the article before deciding to discard it purely to avoid potential cognitive dissonance.

Like the dissonance needed to yell about something the government isn't actually doing and ignoring the obvious attempts to be reasonable (throwing out citizens' data, making sure they properly figure out privacy before proceeding)? If you read the article without bias it's not really alarming; it's an agency trying to do its job and even trying to minimize privacy issues for citizens.