For NSA chief, terrorist threat drives passion to "collect it all" observers say

While it limits the effectiveness of our government, informed representative democracy is the least bad system we've found for also limiting its abuses. Our representatives should be informed of everything the government does, because that limits the power of the government. I'd go further and say that on important questions, the public has a right to know as well. If a few individuals or organisations decide what is secret, they can expand the zone of secrecy until everything is secret, and refuse to tell the public why it is secret because, well that's a secret too. That situation has come to pass with programs like Tempora in the UK or PRISM in the US.

Of course the military would like things to remain classified indefinitely, and of course their effective power is limited by exposing information. The most effective military would be one about which absolutely nothing was known, with all weapons secret, and one with absolute power over the civilian population, but we don't accept that in peacetime or for the long term because it would effectively be tyranny. So we limit military power, and military secrecy, and sometimes important weapons (like nuclear missiles) will be made public knowledge, because if they were not too much power would be concentrated in the hands of too few, and we would no longer have anything approaching an informed public.

Taking nuclear weapons as an example, the public needs to know the cost, how many the government makes, the conditions in which they'll be used, and the cost in human lives if they are used. They don't need to know how to make or deploy one. I believe that's an acceptable trade-off. I don't accept that there are important questions where the necessary data must be kept secret even from the people's representatives.

Going back to the original question - total take surveillance by the NSA. The most effective spy organisation would be able to tap every connection, peruse any and all records instantly, censor and control the press, regularly feed disinformation to the public, and control politicians and what they say. Clearly most people in the world think that's unacceptable, because it conflicts with other values which we hold to be more important (privacy, freedom of speech, democratic decision making) - widespread surveillance or widespread secrecy are inimical to democracy, and allowing secret activities to be managed by anyone else than the people, or their direct representatives, allows a dangerous usurpation of power.

I suggest not taking such decisions in the first place. This is a false dillema.

In a true democracy, very little "must be kept secret".

Let's say that we believe that it was absolute necessary for the various services "to monitor everyone's mails".

While the content of the emails they monitor could have been kept secret (for operational reasons), the decision, reasoning and procedure of monitoring them should have been public knowledge and voted explicitly.

> I am okay with your morals, as long as they don't infringe too badly on my own.

If you continue down this route you're going to have instances in which severely deranged individuals can agree that killing people is good. Or, to give you a less stretched example: just because two newcons can agree that it's the best decision to just cut all Social Security to seniors who're unable to work because of their declining health, it does not make that decision a moral one.

Hold your horses! He can perfectly well find it immoral to call your morality horseshit, and be conscientiously acting immorally!

The majority of the figures of "Classical Liberalism" were from Britain. France also had political figures like Rousseau, but they tend to somewhat more Romanticism and less practicality.

Germany's tradition of antisemitism owed most to Martin Luther, who explicitly envisioned a genocide/enslavement of Jews in his "On The Jews and their Lies", a book beloved by Hitler.

Would the woman who gets killed by her father in an act of 'honor killing' because she was raped be well-served by their society being educated that it's wrong -- despite what their local morality has to say about it? Of course. It means she might have not been killed if her local community didn't have a corrupt sense of morality.