It also seems ineffective. They're prying into all of our private information, when only a handful need to be watched. It gets back to fear of profiling, doesn't it?
In a way, if viewed tactically, it is consistent with Obama's embrace of wide-scale drone attacks. Obama favors remote-control drones, with no boots on the ground, to the sweaty, bloody, difficult chore of troops. And likewise, he probably likes the idea of data mining over the messy nature of human intelligence gathering. Hence walking away from Russian leads over the Boston bombers.
But there is a lot more to it than that. I think we now see why the Obama Admin has labored so hard to pin a terrorism label on conservative groups - so they can justify, to themselves, abusing these powers against their political enemies.
The first step the Soviets took after the Red Army captured Eastern Europe was to set up secret police in each country. We cannot allow the RINO pundits to pretend that there is a chance we are seeing the same thing with all this. We have to push for an end to this gross overstepping.
I think big govt. of any stripe is a huge mistake.Let’s go back to states rights dismantle big govt. and those who love chicago, la, nyc other hell holes let them have it.
I am not convinced that the metadata collected is limited to the described data points.