They're not committing crimes against the American people. Not one American has been found who has been demonstrably harmed by any NSA program. Without harm, there no criminal act. That said, something can be unlawful without being criminal.
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, 1,200 Muslims were arrested. Some were beaten (this is according to the Justice Department's own Inspector General of the time). Hundreds were held for months. Absolutely none of them were found to be with al-Qaeda.
These are just two examples of MANY. You know what's scary? The spying that the NSA, FBI, and CIA do gets people put on lists. There are lists of people to arrest in the event of an attack. Hoover of the FBI had something like 70,000 people on a list during the era of Communism fear. The vast majority of those people were innocent of any crime.
Over the past century, these lists have been kept openly and kept secretly when different administrations denounced them. But they have been kept (at the FBI at least. Hoover hid them illegally). Letting the NSA spy on us and treating us as if we were assumed criminals before innocent is a terrible way to waste away your fundamental rights.
And the scary thing is we wouldn't even have known that we were being spied on for sure unless Snowden said something.
These are crimes against the American people. You can't tell me that the FISA court not rejecting any warrants is a good thing. Out of tens of thousands of requests, not one gets rejected? That is a failure of the checks and balance system our founding fathers set up. THAT is definitely a crime against the American people.
Antagonizing a cop just to be a dick will probably result in those minor charges he would have ignored if you were nice, getting written up with a smile on his face. That's 100% your fault in that case.
That it may be difficult for a court to unambiguously distinguish this abuse of power from legitimate application of discretion doesn't mean that it is legitimate.
We have to look at the worst-case outcomes and make our safeguards against them; anything else is inviting disaster.
> ruining somebody's life as an abuse of power by cops--especially since they are given carte blanche to do so.
The mandate of law enforcement across the USA is to freely destroy peoples lives? Interesting...
Yes, I recall the NSA and other government agencies having such self-policing groups.
Tell me, do you really in your heart of hearts think a corrupt organization (say a police dept in a specific place.. if pressed for an example, say Maricopa County in Arizona?) has a functioning IA group?
The federal government has an IA group too. Many of them. I'm sure that if Snowden had raised his concerns with them, they would have gladly worked with him to solve those problems.......
That all said, going back to the very first interaction--you and the cop--we see that it becomes purely a decision on the cop's part whether or not you are going to be sent down into the machine.
Justice should not be so arbitrary, but here in the US it oftentimes is; don't pretend otherwise.
EDIT:
As for safeguards...the state can deprive you of years of freedom and set you free afterwards with an "oops". That's bullshit, even if the safeguards finally kick in. And if you end up with "resisting arrest" or just antagonizing the system or embarassing a DA, those safeguards seem to magically fail.
That "best" is pretty damn shit.
"In June 1919, Attorney General Palmer told the House Appropriations Committee that all evidence promised that radicals would 'on a certain day...rise up and destroy the government at one fell swoop.'
Criminal acts, in general, don't require harm (some specific crimes may involve a harm as a required element, but that is not generally the case -- generally, crimes exist to prevent harm, but that does not mean a harm must be realized for a crime to occur), and, in any case, depriving the American people of the popular sovereignty by exercising the power of government inconsistent with the constraints in which it is granted by the people through the Constitution is, in and of itself, a harm.
Eroding the protections I'm guaranteed, for example against general search warrants, is causing me immediate harm.
What is the harm? Something that belongs to me has been taken from me against my will, through the use of coercion, intimidation and force.
First they came for some foreigners and I did not speak out - because I was an American.
As an American, how would I know? It is against the law to read my mail; but if the government has been secretly reading my mail without my knowledge, then by your logic (and I use that word lightly here) I have not been harmed, since I didn't know about it?
Do you even know the meaning of the word "rights" ? My rights have been violated; I don't have to demonstrate harm.
Of course, this statement heavily relies on what you mean by "demonstrably" and "harm". What is the standard of proof you would require to demonstrate harm? As you say it, it sounds like one of those terms that you can forever pushback against and say "but X didn't demonstrate harm sufficiently".
The most likely harm that I would consider widespread would be the chilling effect. For example, Chris Hedges and others tried to sue the gov for the NDAA's chilling effect, but once they got to court it was thrown out because they had "no standing". So it's pretty obvious that you can't say that a court ruling on something demonstrates harm, because the courts themselves are part of the harm occurring.
As a matter of fact, I bet I could have a pretty good claim that the NSA program has harmed me. I am an Iraq combat vet with PTSD, and happened to be someone who has talking about the NSA doing this stuff since the early 2000's. At my last meeting with the VA, I specifically stated that I was concerned at the confidentiality of my talks due to their being entered in an electronic system that I suspected the NSA and other three-letters would have access to. Therefore I quit my PTSD treatment because I felt I could not trust the VA system or any claims of doctor-patient confidentiality. I actually asked the doc to make sure she typed that into the system so that in the future I could use it as evidence if the need ever arose. I'm doing fine now mostly of my own volition, but what I think about is how many other vets had the same gut feeling and kept their problems hidden and suffered greatly for it?
This is only one example that I think is pretty concrete.
They've also been providing tips to the DEA: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/dea-and-nsa-team-intel...
How is subverting due process by engaging in parallel construction not a crime against US citizens?