I am still pretty confused about how this community seems to not have known these programs existed. It has been widely reported almost since inception. Not to mention the broad record of previous land line recording programs.
The difference this time is not specifically the new information but the fact that it hasn't successfully been buried in the news after a day or two so far and people are in fact getting more upset about it. This is a good thing. If people aren't talking about it, the chance of doing anything about it and expressing mass disapproval is significantly reduced.
Maybe nothing will happen this time either, but a lot of people are angry about it at the same time, and finally talking about it en masse, and I don't see that as anything but a great thing.
NO! Now is not the time to relax, and it really doesn't matter if it's 1 week old news or 10 year old news. If it's that old, it's much more important to finally have the debate about privacy, which Congress and the nation as a whole mostly skipped over it because of the fear or terrorists.
It's about time that discussion started again, to see if things like the Patriot Act and FISA are first of all, constitutional, and second of all, if all the privacy breaching is worth it to Americans, and only if there is real proof that it works not based on feeling and security theatre.
It is nearly impossible to have a public discussion about threat assessment and mitigation. If a person has never truly experienced threat, which the vast(99%+) majority of the US public has not, then a persons ability to even identify threat is exponentially reduced. The perceived safety of a persons daily life directly effects the perception of overall threats, which in the context of the US severely jades any discussion towards inherently safe.
I am not an advocate of public surveillance and I am a strongly opinionated in regards to privacy, but my experiences abroad have lead me to resolve this conviction into the reality that is our world, and that world is not the lives we have in the US. The threats to this country are real, are large scale, are extreme, and are discovered every single day.
I know the argument is that we need to talk about this and we need to have review, but this has happened already. It happens all the time. It happens every time a warrant is issued. It was not one person or 5 people or 100 people, but thousands of people that have seen the threat and that have fought the threat with their own hands. These are the people that have time and time again decided that to much information is better than not enough.
I know that people will not agree with this, but I long ago discovered that principles and good intentions do not stop bullets and bombs.
Let me rephrase.
What is different about the story this year, that makes people and the news all the sudden pay attention?
Furthermore, the President and Director of National Intelligence have come out and openly admitted to mass dragnet surveillance, while trying to make it seem like not a big deal and simultaneously trying to suggest it's tremendously useful and doesn't do very much. Couple that with some ridiculous statements about a goal of 100% security and people got pretty pissed off by his statement. It has the mark of someone trying to make an embarrassing discovery go away.