The famous John Adams quote comes to mind:
"...Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other...”
It is eminently and blazingly clear that the people behind these abuses of power are neither religious nor moral. And I, along with many others, made the mistake of allowing them to be entrusted with it, feeling that the safeguards put in place (FISA requirements, etc) were adequate enough, if observed, to protect us.
They are not adequate/observed/protective, and either the safeguards need to be fixed/observed and violations severely punished with extensive prison sentences, or the ability to surveil removed entirely.
I am in the camp now, that these surveillance abilities as applied to US citizens ought to be completely removed. Will it mean more terrorism? Perhaps. But I would rather deal with the terrorism attacks than continue unabated down the road of a Police State surveillance-wise that rivals East Germany during the cold war.
I am in the camp now, that these surveillance abilities as applied to US citizens ought to be completely removed. Will it mean more terrorism? Perhaps. But I would rather deal with the terrorism attacks than continue unabated down the road of a Police State surveillance-wise that rivals East Germany during the cold war.
You raise excellent points. Our intel agencies have technical capabilities that the East German Stasi could not have dreamt of.
But they are in the hands some of our most emotionally disturbed people who were recruited from a morally slouching citizen pool.