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I know this post is long, but as a form of contrition, even if only read by very few who have taken the time to read this thread, I feel compelled to do so.

I have made this public mea culpa more than a few times, but this is possibly why this entire wholesale violation of the surveillance system makes me literally steaming mad, more than usual. I fully confess that I DO feel violated and taken advantage of by this entire scandal.

When I was listening to this new information on the Dan Bongino show yesterday (See the link at the start of the thread if you are interested) I began to feel anger leaking out of my seams.

I was someone who took the stance after 9/11 that we were at war. And we were.

And I have always felt (and still do) that in a time of war, certain liberties may have to be curtailed. People may disagree with that, but it is undeniable that we do curtail liberties in war. We don’t allow certain information to be disseminated or published in papers for obvious reasons. So I don’t think that is a very unorthodox point of view, even as it is not uniformly accepted. But that is how I roll.

With the massive degree of signal intelligence (voice, email, text, etc) that has been taking place, capturing and storing in databases of the legal communications of normal, non-lawbreaking citizens, the system has been ripe for abuse, and even before it began, voice was being given to concerns.

Our government, who I and many others stupidly trusted, put in place mechanisms to ostensibly protect our rights, yet allow the government to be able to observe and analyze communications in an ongoing attempt to ward off another attack like the one on 9/11.

When they set this massive system up, they put in place all kinds of rules, regulations, and guidelines to protect our privacy as citizens.

That’s nice, as far as it goes. Anyone who works with computers and databases that are accessed understands there are weak points inherent in the technology itself and the official processes and procedures to ensure proper and legal access to data in databases and to minimize the impact to our privacy under law as US citizens. We know it isn’t perfect.

But as the now oft quoted Benjamin Franklin statement “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” implies, I see now I should have been willing to accept a greater risk of another 9/11 rather than to put that power of surveillance into the hands of government bureaucrats.

We have the best Constitution in the world. If observed and backed by law, it protects us to a very high degree, it is that well designed.

But as Alexandr Solzhenitsyn pointed out from the perspective of someone in the Gulag, the Soviet Union also had a wonderfully constructed Constitution that sounded perfect, but was twisted by law and the Soviet Government to be used as a weapon against its citizens because it was so deliberately twisted and misused that it gave Constitutional cover to those abusing it to imprison people.

Our Constitution is great. But if it is routinely ignored (as it is) it begins to be worth less than the parchment it was written on.

And we can see that in this case, all those byzantine, comprehensive, well thought out, and legal guidelines to protect us from government bureaucrats who could legally access up to five years of rich data on each and every one of us...well, they simply stepped over them and ignored them to spy on an opposition party in a presidential campaign.

If they did that (and I am 100% certain they did) it takes no stretch of the imagination to see how contemptuously they would brush away those “protections” if they chose to squash us like bugs. And likely do.

So I was wrong to accept it. I was foolish, and had too much faith in our Constitution which our forefathers designed to be administered by moral people, with inherent ways to take into account that corrupt, greedy, vindictive, and evil people are found everywhere (especially in government) and protect us from them. I should have been more willing to risk another attack like 9/11, but I thought the risk of becoming a Surveillance State was worth it.

I was wrong, damned wrong. And it makes me angry to have to accept it.