How would you feel if you found the past three weeks, there was someone parked outside your home, who followed you to work, and logged when and where you left?
I mean, it's all public information, right?
How would you feel if they did this, specifically because of your political beliefs?
The argument seems bizarre to me. A much better pre-technology analogy would be if I wrote lots of letters to the editor of a newspaper and people read them.
Maybe it would even be a little creepy if the government had an FBI agent in every small town that read letters to the editor and sent them to be filed by topic in Washington or something.
But it wouldn't be spying right?
Here's the real issue, which this semantics argument is derailing. Several times, a shooting spree has occurred, and all the government agencies say, "Oh, yeah... We knew about them! Anyways, the mass shooter's community is very much under attack..."
Pretty hard to swallow when the federal agencies are spending time and resources holding a magnifying glass over political opponents (with a long, LONG track record of nonviolence).
1) I would at least have a chance of knowing about it, and could lodge a complaint with the relevant agency, or take them to court, if necessary. This may not work, but there's at least some level of recourse and accountability.
2) The chilling issue is that of mass surveillance. The kind of surveillance you describe is time- and resource-intensive, and doesn't scale. If agencies can collect and analyze data on a vast number of people with a few clicks of a mouse, that's a danger to everyone's freedom.
https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-chase-employees-des...