A lot of people are still forming their conflicting opinions on PRISM.... the merits of such a program - which can only be achieved by displacing the privacy of millions of domestic and foreign citizens.
(Note: The poll is probably somewhat flawed, since it doesn't segment into foreign/domestic categories either. I can imagine that opinion between pro/against varies depending on nationality.) ----
Check choices below
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." — Benjamin Franklin
Government analysis of all communications can obviously help find terrorists. But it can and will also be used against others – protest groups, environmentalists, other non-desirables.
Think what McCarthy (the communist witch hunter, not the inventor of Lisp) could have done with this, and what the Syria or Iran or China is doing with similar systems in their own countries – which America just lost the moral high ground to oppose.
Countries that aren't or don't want to become totalitarian don't spy on their own people, no matter how tempting.
I like that this is a forum where you have to specify that.
Next up do you support nazi concentration camps and Toronto mayor Rob Ford smoking crack.
This poll may be a foregone conclusion, but if so let's criticise it for that, rather than suggesting that HN users are karmawhores.
While I agree that that is true, as a non-US-citizen I also find that slightly offensive (not your saying it, but the fact that it's true). It's unambiguously wrong to invade your citizens' privacy, but it's ok if it's one of us?
And furthering ancarda's point, maybe it's a more interesting questions when it's more abstract:
Would it be ok for an intelligence agency to monitor all communication for criminal activity, so long as they only act on the information they gather when criminal activity is indeed taking place (and let's assume they always act, there's no discrimination. And they do not use the information for any other purpose).
If an intelligence agency has the technical capacity to monitor all communications then there'd have to be a pretty compelling reason (assuming their raison d'etre is the prevention and detection of crime) not to. They'd just be doing their job to the best of their ability, it'd be negligent not to.
While I would of course not be comfortable with that, I've never actually heard a convincing philosophical argument for personal privacy.
I hope that PRISM will be a catalyst/Rubicon of a sort - that there won't be turning back and fast forgetting. This is clearly overreach and lets hope that the scaremongering hawks have finally crossed the line behind which there will finally be pushback.