Ask a person in Argentina, Chile, Spain, and lots of other places besides.
>I'd expect the government to be collecting all public information for its citizens and those visiting the country - why not?
Because their social media lives are not its business -- citizens or not.
This is a bit absurd. First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees your right to publish papers. But now you also want the right to prevent your publications from being read? The government has had a program collecting a vast majority of publications for a very long time i.e. the Library of Congress, so one might say the precedent has already been set.
I'm not saying they should have unfettered access to everything (far from it!), but gathering and analyzing this type of information is the very definition of their business.
The real question is what levels of information gathering are going to allow without a warrant, and who do those laws apply to?
If someone is plotting a crime while having sex with their partner in their bedroom, how is that not the government's business?
See how it gets problematic?
Bad actors like that can communicate in 200000 ways. If governments want to target "known terrorist organizations" let them target them, and follow those people, monitor their houses, etc -- not monitor the general population in the off chance they see something.
>I'm not saying they should have unfettered access to everything (far from it!), but gathering and analyzing this type of information is the very definition of their business.
So, in 1980, before Facebook, they wouldn't be able to catch anyone?
How about they monitor actual suspects with good old police work and leave the BS?
That escalated quickly. So to you monitoring information posted to a third party is the same as listening in on you and your spouse while you're bumping uglies?
> See how it gets problematic?
No I don't as I reject your example outright. What goes on within the four walls of a person's bedroom has already been established as protected. In contrast, what gets sent out to a third party has been established as not protected.
> Bad actors like that can communicate in 200000 ways. If governments want to target "known terrorist organizations" let them target them, and follow those people, monitor their houses, etc -- not monitor the general population in the off chance they see something.
Sure and this is one of the many ways they can do it. Just because there are other options available doesn't mean they can't use this as an avenue.
> So, in 1980, before Facebook, they wouldn't be able to catch anyone?
I never said that nor implied it. I'm saying that social media posts are fair game and likely a valuable source of information for identified terrorists and potential terrorists.
> How about they monitor actual suspects with good old police work and leave the BS?
That's a false dichotomy. There's no reason you can't have modern data analysis of social media posts in addition to traditional police work. Technology is a force multiplier. Back in the day people would manually examine finger prints to find a match based on a categorization system. Now a computer does it nearly instantly.