It is only evil when the other guys are doing it.
Similarly, I'm not getting too riled up about all this, since I thought programs like this were Constitutional back when "my guy" was running them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5864729 ... looks like Republicans and Democrats are pretty close in their consistency. Small sample, but usually what you see on most similar issues.
Democrat Views of NSA Surveillance (Pew)
Jan 2006 - 37% Acceptable, 61% Unacceptable
June 2013 - 64% Acceptable, 34% Unacceptable
Change: +27% -27%
Jan 2006: "NSA has been investigating people suspected of terrorist involvement by secretly listening in on phone calls & reading emails without court approval..."
June 2013: "NSA has been getting secret court orders to track calls of millions of Americans to investigate terrorism..."
Not that Republicans are any better. They went the other way for probably similar political reasons. But at least, in my opinion, they are moving in the right direction for now. I think I can safely predict this will at least partially reverse next republican president[1].
http://www.people-press.org/2013/06/10/majority-views-nsa-ph...
[1] Edit: Interesting side effect of democracy: since our leaders have the support of a majority of voters the cognitive dissonance of voting for someone who supports policies you don't like will lead a significant portion to support those policies anyway.
The 2006 question askes about warrantless wiretapping ("listening in on phone calls...without court approval")
The 2013 questions asks about tracking calls (not listening in) under FISA warrants ("secret court orders to track calls").
Not the same thing.
Just to be clear, that's not at all the same thing. FISA warrants have always been allowed to be quite broad, and were primarily concerned with identifying that there was a foreign intelligence target and that appropriate minimization procedures were in place, exactly as is the case now.
What was at issue in 2006 had no review from anyone outside of the executive branch for either of those issues.
You can oppose what is being done now, but you cannot (without erroneously assuming that everyone else in the world agrees with you on everything but partisanship) validly look at the 2006 polls and the 2013 polls, especially given the difference in both the kind of surveillance at issue (listening in vs. call tracking) and the procedures at issue (warrantless vs. FISA warrants) and makes claims about consistency because they aren't about the same things, even if you think that people should feel the same about them.
I actually agree with you about the wording of the poll and the difference between the metadata collection and "warrantless wiretapping". But hey, all the stuff HN is going nuts about for the past week was all cleared by the FISA court, AFAICT, so the lack of that fig leaf wasn't really what would have pissed off a consistent citizen in 2006, no?
Assuming by "a consistent citizen" you mean the same people "going nuts" on HN, probably not.
But that's not really relevant, now, is it?
On one hand listening/reading without warrant is worse than tracking with secret order. But on the other hand targeting suspected terrorists is not as bad as targeting millions of Americans. After all that might be you!
The theory is that a secret court order procedure on much broader surveillance program is enough to make NSA's surveillance acceptable to 27% of Democrats seems farfetched to me.
Of course the clencher is that the new program is IN ADDITION TO the continuing 2006 program. This was not mentioned in the poll question. Too bad most people don't understand this.
The procedural difference isn't the only difference in either the public facts or, more relevantly, the poll questions, and the issue isn't that it explains the entire difference, its that the difference in the circumstances and the poll questions makes the conclusion that the swing reflects a change of opinion on the same thing (whether partisan or otherwise) invalid.