They probably think that they do love their country more than their power, while believing they need the power to protect their country. This may be a sort of 'moral corruption', though not the conventional sort. It doesn't seem 'evil' to me.
- C.S. Lewis
> It’s only habit, you know. I’m not mad anymore, really.
> It wasn’t as though she wanted her mother’s keys, nor her mother’s life that went with them. She scarcely knew what she wanted. She knew what she feared—to be locked up in some dark, narrow place by people who loved her. An enemy might drop his guard, weary of his task, turn his back; love would never falter. Her fingers rubbed restlessly on the stone.
-- Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold
I've known a few people involved in intelligence, and they absolutely believe they were serving and loving their country. It reminds me a bit of being an infrastructure person where when you mess up, everybody knows, but when you're doing your job well, nobody knows you exist. They see a constant and non-stop stream of threats that outsiders don't see, and when a threat is stopped nobody knows about it. I would bet it's not too hard to justify the intrusive capabilities and any "mistakes" made with them when you have that visibility into the successes. Humans are wonderful at justifying what they want to believe is true, and intel is no exception.
The individual intel person is not the problem here. It's a systemic problem enabled by legislation that needs to be addressed at the legislative level.
CIA director admitted to interferring in elections. https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/374372-ex-...
Is it theoretically possible to stop terrorism/catch and guys to the same extent without breaking the constitution? I think so, but it would probably require a lot more boots on the ground, and a lot of creativity and smart thinking from individuals to be able to get as good outcomes as you’d get from just looking at data when you aren’t supposed to.
Have you ever seen how the bottom-level of people in a huge bureaucratic organization behave? They're not evil, they're just being human. Unless you're prepared to say that at least 65% to 95% of humans are evil[1].
I'm not sure what kind of freedom you advocate for Ben, it certainly doesn't seem to jive with the notion of We the People.
So is the large majority of the population.
Unchallenged idealism is the root of many evils. If you are convinced of your own righteousness, its very easy to “ends justify the means” almost anything. Its the danger of even a well-motivated person ending up with a cultivation or otherwise in an ideological echo chamber.