BigMike Loc: yerington nv

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/10/why-the-nsas-defense-of-mass-data-collection-makes-no-sense/280715/

We are setting ourselves up to lose our Freedom in so many ways its scary. Will the NSA be the beginning of a Frankenstein? Couple this with the voluntary surrender of personal responsibility and the intrusion of the government into every aspect of our lives, I'd say we're well on the way to the creation of that monster and we need a serious reality check.

Whatamess Loc: SC

We are just a baby step away from c*******m. I'm glad Obama is having to call the leaders of other countries and assure them he is not spying on them...Yea...right! He's pissing the whole world off at us. This marxist arrogant ass needs to be stopped.

archie bunker Loc: Texas

It seems like we are the bad guys. For doing whats right! It's all backwards, upside down, and inside out! I don't care! I'm speaking my mind!!

BigMike Loc: yerington nv

And they say we resist him because we're r****ts!

Loki Loc: Georgia

Personally, I don't hold the fact that he is half white against him. The problem is that he is all Red. He is not Muslim, or Christian, or anything else. He is wh**ever religion benefits him politically at the time.

lpnmajor Loc: Arkansas

I have nothing to hide, do you?

jonhatfield Loc: Green Bay, WI

Two ways to look at NSA, Big Mike, as a Frankenstein and threat to our freedom or as our defense against Frankensteins, zombies, and goblins threatening our freedom. Appropriate subject for the Halloween season! ha.

Perhaps we're all a little paranoid--the left (I thought this topic was going to be from the liberals--ha), the right (oops, the NSA is in their rifle sights), and the muddled middle.

I'll speak from the perspective of muddled middle paranoia. Oooh, I see all sorts of scary goblins out there...zombie hc****es come back from the dead, gun-toting vigilante goblin gangs (riding around on motorbikes, of course), white robed r****t sorcerers (no, they're gone, ghosts of the past) and, well, gee, I can't think of any more horrors I need the NSA to guard against. Oh, I forgot, the Taliban, al-Quida, the jihadists.

Returning to reality, what is the purpose of the NSA and what national security interest is served by collecting available data on everyone not only in the USA but in France, Brazil, Germany, and, if in those countries who have expressed objections, presumably also in Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, and other hot spots? I shouldn't bring up those asides--the paranoid rightists might add 2 and 200 and get 2002 reasons to believe King Obama and his cohorts aspire not only to rule America but the whole world. Ooooh, really scary.

Quite frankly I have no idea what use all this galaxy of collected communications has or how it could even be explored for landing on Mars or wherever to find a specific ore field to mine for usable mineral to refine? Is that how we located Bin Ladin? The question is, why all the irrelevant communications instead of focusing on the sites where the gold ore we're looking for is located? It sounds like the TV show situation. Did we need Snowden to confirm that fiction as reality?

But what is the reality? Is it a bureaucratic matter of we must do something and someone came up with this big idea and it was carried out like "fast & furious" without thought of what real use it had or how it might turn out?

I really don't see this as any more of a privacy threat than surveilence (spelling problem--must be a Halloween spell) cameras on streets and in stores (or, so far as I'm concerned, in bathrooms) if access is for security & crime investigation. Despite the tv show, I do still have difficulty imagining how these galaxies of communication data can be combed for patterns or specifics of much usefulness before events, the supposed purpose of this large and supposedly costly effort. I can, however, if it is somehow workable and useful, understand why data in France, Germany, etc. would be collected...Europe is the destination of immigrants from the Middle East and Africa and these immigrant populations are inevitably targets to recruit soldiers for the cause...as in the instance of recruitment in the Minneapolis Somali community of one of the Kenyan mall terrorist attackers. That said, why Brazil and just how widespread is the collection of communications & how widespread the threats?

I guess we are indeed the world's policeman and will have to be through much of this new century...just a matter of geopolitics...a matter of our own security and interests and a matter of the future of civilization with the form of government and rights and principles on our & the Brits' model. Geopolitics is complicated and ambiguous. no simple answers or map to follow. I personally trust the sincerity of the American way forward and the muddled messes that are part of our not being dictatorial and absolute.

Still, this Frankenstein Big Brother appairation (darn spelling) is scary. Should be fun for the extreme left and right to chase around and make up stories about.

The worst part of this Halloween scenario is that it has made me aware of my own political ghost story and paranoia. You see, I was a McCarthyite in high school and would have seen this collection of communication security program (if it had been possible then) as an engine to keep track of the scary l*****t plots to make us like Soviet c*******m. Now that that twisted lefty ghost is exorcised a new ghost has morphasized (spelling ghost again!) on my right...the twisted extreme right that I see as the new real (or at least real scary) threat to America. NSA protect us from this goblin!

Leaving aside the Halloween joke part, I did and still do consider c*******m was a real internal threat in America & I do consider the extreme right as equally ideological, radical, absolutist and N**i-like as the extreme left of the past was, except Soviet C*******t-like. I regard them as the real present threat to Americanism. I believe they are sincere. I believe the c*******ts and Troskyites were sincere. I believe they were and they are mistaken and dangerous in their extremism and discredit the ideas and ideals they consider themselves the true champions of and which have degrees of validity and use--perhaps highest validity (which explains the fanaticism) but uses to be worked out and checked and balanced and moderated.

I hope y'all on the extreme right & left can appreciate and laugh at the irony that there can be an extreme middle that is just as fanatic and, yes, as paranoid as y'all are. ha.

Halloween would be a good time for us all, us'ns, to come to terms with the warped Frankenstein monsters inside our own political thinking.

rumitoid

I think you got the wrong direction. It is closer to see us a babystep away from a Right Wing dictatorship with the powers granted agencies like the NSA. Unless we repeal the Patriot Act and do so soon, our freedom will be lost, but not to c*******m, which even the Chinese can see doesn't work, but to the Dark America of Covert ops.

jonhatfield Loc: Green Bay, WI

Look at what you said. HE's pissing the whole world off at us. Did Obama initiate this program? REALITY CHECK. HE did not start the program. HE is not spying on them. Not the whole world is angry at us--some understand the situation. He is not assuring them we aren't spying on them when he calls the leaders of other countries, he's explaining what we are doing and why.

hprinze Loc: Central Florida

hprinze Loc: Central Florida

I am not at all OK with it. But there's not much I can do about it.

BigMike Loc: yerington nv

No muddle for me on this issue for a few reasons, and for the record, every political test I've taken (hey, they're fun!) puts me a little right of center and a little more libertarian than authoritarian.

NSA activities have violated a boundary set down in our Constitution. Reason in and enough of itself to object to the NSA.

I have doubts to the NSA's effectiveness in these endeavors. Since they lie about virtually everything, who can tell what they're really doing? They even lie to the Court set up for them to be accountable to. I've heard reports that maybe one or two terrorist acts in the US have been thwarted by NSA surveillence. Who knows?

Information is POWER. What happens to all the info unrelated to terrism? They don't destroy it, you can believe that!

Just because they may not be able to closely examine all that info now, it does not follow that in 5 or 10 or 15 years they won't be able to.

Human nature, being what it is, will tempt someone who is in a position to do so, sooner or later, to make use of all that info. THAT is a distinct and realistic probability. Paranoia has nothing to do with that prediction.

The time to consider these things is before they happen; not after its too late. History is replete with examples of nations and individuals blithely going about their business, ignoring possibilities and assuming that life will continue as it has, only to be caught flat-footed when things changed for the worse.

AuntiE Loc: 45th Least Free State

How do you know you have nothing to hide? There are so many new law, regulations and soforth, how do you know you have nothing to have. Do you know every law?

Your answer is the standard "cop out".

AuntiE Loc: 45th Least Free State

No, he did not initiate the programs; however, by his failure to rein it in, it is now on steroids.

The whole world may not be angry; however, a great many are and some are the few remaining allies we have.

Your i***tic premise is the President of our country is informing other nations what we are doing. If he is, it would be a "high crime". We have no need to explain our practices.

stymie

Do you really see this as something to joke about? Actually I had a hard time trying to follow your logic throughout this entire post. Perhaps your attempt to add humor in a serious subject caused it to loose some of your intended meaning. No, I am not paranoid about what someone may discover by continued surveillance; I'm paranoid about my liberty and freedoms that are being infringed by doing so. I do agree in part that we must somehow police the world since our enemy resides in most of it's parts now, including home. However, this can be accomplished for the most part by information sharing rather than information gathering, i.e. Russia telling us about Boston bombers. Actually we could learn something by simply listening and acting rather than attempting to gather all this broad information that we could not possibly decipher with our present technology. Last but not least, please explain to me how we exorcised the left, who you consider the extreme twisted right and what or who you see as a extreme middle? Just can't get my centrist conservative mind wrapped around all of this.