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In other words, I'm perfectly happy taking the risks to society that would exist if the government didn't read literally everyone's private communications. The right to freedom from unwarranted search and seizure is written into our basic government document, if you don't like a society like that, go move to a totalitarian state to feel comfortable in your safety.
I also see that if a organization holding too many secrets gets too big, something is going to leak. If you drive from BMI airport to Washington DC at the wrong time of the day you might encounter one of America's worst traffic jams when everybody gets off work at the NSA headquarters.
I remember reading a non-fiction account of certain intrigues from the early 1970s where a private eye says: "If I know something there is 1 chance it leaks out, if two people know it is more like 11, if it is three people, like 111, etc" and given that increasing difficulty of keeping secrets, if you really want to keep something a secret you really have to keep it a secret.
The author of this book
https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Company-Diary-Philip-Agee/dp/0...
was faulted for revealing specific names, dates, etc. of CIA personnel that directly put them in danger. I wasn't surprised at all that the NSA was doing the stuff that Snowden "revealed", in fact it would have been a scandal if they weren't doing that because the whole reason the NSA exists to do exactly that. Snowden can be faulted not so much for revealing the big picture, but revealing lots of details that affected specific activities and programs.
Of course, without all those details people wouldn't realize what a house of cards a non-encrypted internet is. Back around 2005 I turned on a Wi-Fi packet sniffer on an academic network and immediately saw email passwords for about 15 people (I deleted them right away) It is not just the NSA hoovering up data but governments like France, Israel, Iran, Russia, China not to mention high school hackers, organized crime organizations, etc. People never seem to take security seriously enough and unfortunately it took Snowden to wake up to the possibility that the NSA can do that but so can everybody else.
However, Snowden fleeing to russia (a 100% dictatorship country) that is doing things way worse than NSA, and then being silent about that makes him a hypocrite.
It's very naive to think that targeted surveillance, and the means to achieve it via bulk collection and other methods, isn't necessary in the incredibly hostile world in which we live.
Please put away your dogmatic, child-like slogans and open your eyes to see the real world.
you are in their databases as of 10+ year old information and their capabilities have grown massively since then.
Every contact you have with another person is logged and catalogued- exceedingly likely recorded and at the very least automatically transcribed and easily searchable by thousands of people with no oversight.
People were even using it to stalk women they liked.
Your stance is not rooted in the facts as we know them.
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Notably, you're omitting anything about the role that intelligence collection and Parallel Construction play in prosecuting Americans for crimes which have nothing at all to do with national security, and which they have no possible way to defend themselves against the use of that information.
Besides, a later comment flatly asserting the impossibility of abuse, like three weeks after https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/19/fbi-intellig... did rounds in the news, smells like good old-fashioned trolling. Anyone seeking to seriously discuss this topic is aware of that development.