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The other day I was considering commenting in a negative way about something the NSA tweeted, but a voice in my head said, "Do you really want to be put on a special surveilance list?" That's when I realized our freedoms are under threat by those that are tasked with defending them. Think what you will about the NSA, but they certainly have not gone out of their way to make clear to me they care about my freedoms. Lying to congress, private courts granting warrants via secret constitution interpretations -- something is very wrong here. I fear the NSA as an upstanding citizen and they seem to be OK with that.

Also more related to your comment the "don't watch ISIS videos it gives them power." I think it's misguided. Just out of curiousity I tracked down a couple of them online and it was very thought provoking. It did not make me fear ISIS more, but it did help me understand the situation more. Just not convinced intelligent people should avoid uncensored information collection, but there is so much being censored in the US right now and the media encourages you to not educate yourself on both sides.

+1 for watching ISIS videos. I needed to understand the situation, I needed to internalize it better. I watched an execution. I watched combat footage. And I am glad I did. I now understand the severity and urgency of the problem. I didn't use a VPN or anything. NSA, come get me.

>Also more related to your comment the "don't watch ISIS videos it gives them power." I think it's misguided. Just out of curiousity I tracked down a couple of them online and it was very thought provoking. It did not make me fear ISIS more, but it did help me understand the situation more. Just not convinced intelligent people should avoid uncensored information collection

I think there has to be a better way to educate oneself/understand the situation than to watch terrorist propaganda. ISIS does not create videos 'to help people understand the situation more' but to radicalize suspectible people into becoming terrorists

Anything else would be second hand though. Sometimes I feel the need to research something for myself and it's important that some people do that. Watching allows me to answer questions like, "What is the message they are trying to get across in these videos?" "Do the videos match up to the descriptions given by the media?" These are important questions to answer.

I get your point - we've slowly, and sometimes quite quickly, seen some of our rights eroded as a result of policies that are advertised as being anti-terrorist.

Speaking directly to this policy, though, isn't your man premise that blow oneself up is bad enough in a vacuum unsupported? Many of these videos are crafted by the terrorist organizations as a recruitment tool. Wouldn't th see organizations not create them if they didn't wield at least some power to actually recruit or radicalize? I don't think arguing that line is consistent, even if I agree that we shouldn't censor these videos.

There are also videos made by murderous dictatorial regimes as a recruitment tool. YouTube has no problem with that. There are videos made by US to get more cannon fodder for their wars which also killed millions of innocent people over the decades. Where do you stop?

I'm fine with stopping recruitment videos for war, but at least do it on principle as against the war, not just against a few particular organizations. It's ridiculous otherwise. It's just one belligerent suppressing the other one in a conflict. Nothing else.

IMO, there is a difference between war and attacks on civilians.

A hypothetical difference, or a practical difference? Can you give me an example of a war that managed to avoid attacks on civilians?

One difference is, war kills far more civilians, typically by several orders of magnitude.

99.9999% of people don't blow themselves up. It's not a significant issue because it's such a bad idea. Don't get me wrong lightning strikes are also a non issue, but that does not make swimming in a thunder storm a good idea.

Basic airport screening is useful, but you very quickly hit diminishing returns.

I get your point - we've slowly, and sometimes quite quickly, seen some of our rights eroded as a result of policies that are advertised as being anti-terrorist.

Honestly when I first heard of ISIS I was pretty sure it was going to turn out to be some kind of "false alarm" excuse to continue war in the Middle East and continue curbing rights in the US. Somewhat like how Al Qaeda didn't really exist until the US started telling ghost stories about them, which turned into free recruiting.

What are the chances that the CIA is behind ISIS?

The fact that there always seems to be some new mortally dangerous enemy (who comes along just when it became unavoidably obvious the previous one was hardly a threat) makes one a little suspicious of the whole thing.

What do we do with those who thinks and is dead sure that blowing himself up in a crowd is a good idea?

We all are able to see patterns, but seeing patterns is not what solves complex problems. When doctor cuts your rotten fingers and then it happens it didn't help to save an entire arm, there is a pattern too. What does this pattern tell us? Doc wants to cut all your limbs to be sure you're not leaving his clinic, right?

> What does this pattern tell us? Doc wants to cut all your limbs to be sure you're not leaving his clinic, right?

Yes.

It's simply called authoritarianism. The problem is that the left AND the right are authoritarian. The benefit of all those 'anti terror' laws is not only not proven but also largely debunked, however, you just need to instill a bit of fear in the population and they give up all their oh so cherished freedoms.

> I hate the fact that if I voice anything skeptical of this policy someone will call me a terrorist sympathizer.

It's a form of bullying and intimidation in order to take away once voice. It's reminiscent of the red scare and the mccarthy era. If you don't agree with our censorship, you are an commie/terrorist/etc sympathizer.

It's a well-used method of silencing opposition. The catholic church used to do that to silence opposition.. You don't think the earth is the center of the universe? You are a heretic.

> And its not like there's any side of the political spectrum I can vote for. Both Hillary and Trump wanted to censor extremism on Twitter.

This is the problem. Money ultimate dictates who we can vote for. By the time the selection gets whittled down to 2, they are pretty much the same - indebted to the elite and the pretense of "left/right" is just a superficial distraction.