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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

The difference is that the president and congress are in on it, they approved these measures and had been briefed (at least supposedly to some extent).

Also, based on what I currently know from watching and reading about the current situation, there is suppose to be SOME form of checks and balances between the FBI, NSA, CIA, some members Congress, judicial committees set up, and the president. What is that committee going to find? That a large portion of the government was doing something wrong, I doubt it.

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So did the people of the US though. There haven't been intelligence abuses because this is all legal to do, and the laws are publicly available knowledge if anyone would care to look.

If the issue is people think some of these things should be illegal, then the challenge is to get the appropriate legislation changed. But if you're only champions are people who think foreign intelligence should be shutdown altogether (as Snowden has been moving his message towards), you're not going to get very far (because it's an obviously stupid idea).

That's clearly not what Snowden has been saying or implying. The information he released about Chinese spying and hacking was about what he considered abuses, e.g. spying and hacking civilian infrastructure in China rather than targeting state actors.

Snowden has been saying in other realms that foreign citizens should have as much privacy as U.S. citizens do, which essentially defeats the purpose of having the NSA at all given how intertwined "national security-related" communications are with the rest of our comms.

The other way you can go is to degrade the level of protection from this type of data collection an American gets to match what NSA can do for foreigners (since having so much as one foreign party to a conversation makes the whole thing fair game for NSA). But I don't think that would be politically feasible, and it's not as if that would really make those who live outside the USA feel any better about the idea of their data being collected.

if they can spy on the rest of the world they will spy on you too,sooner or later.

Indeed, just like if they can wiretap a mafia boss's phone calls they could tap mine, sooner or later.

I regret never getting around to obtaining enough karma to be able to down vote that post. That is a completely false analogy. It's more along the lines of: "Indeed, just like if they can wiretap my son's girlfriend, because her father was from Sweden, then they could tap mine, sooner or later"

Well, that's just it.

Once you assume malice on the part of the government you must assume they can wiretap you for any reason at all.

What many here are saying is that is the reason for which we must not even have this capability at all.

But why then do we allow other law enforcement tools that could also be misused (even horribly misused)? David Simon had an interesting theory about why the tech community is so up in arms about this one.

No, what the NSA is doing is illegal and unconstitutional: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/opinion/the-criminal-nsa.h...

That's why they keep their tortured legal pseudo-justification secret, because if it ever came to a public court, Federal judges would stop them collecting call records on millions of Americans for long periods of time. Read the link and discover why SCOTUS has said that long term surveillance violates the 4th Ammendment.

Back then, it was easy to form a coalition because the guilty party (and his party) was clear, so the other party could make political hay by pursuing an investigation.

In this case, both (major) parties have a lot of blood on their hands. There's no meaningful coalition in Congress that stands to win from such an investigation.

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