> Obviously there is a very large risk to civil liberties in the wrong hands if that system is simply left as-is, but it is at least possible to put procedural, legal, and technical safeguards if the people decide that kind of system is worthwhile.
No, it is not.
It is not the least bit possible to both collect and protect this massive amount of wide net and graph data for our lifetimes.
Even if you believe that our government is completely benign to you and your family, governments change. I want my kids to live to be 100 years old. It's not possible to have lived 100 years without having lived through either the Civil War or McCarthyism (or both).
> For instance, keeping terrorism from becoming so prevalent that the people act for the police state we all want to prevent is a pretty big motivator by itself.
I get your point but this is basically Battered Spouse Syndrome you're arguing.
> It is not the least bit possible to both collect and protect this massive amount of wide net and graph data for our lifetimes.
Then just don't retain it for our lifetime?
Put all the data for a given year on a given set of drives. Melt them with thermite after the retention period is up. Done.
Given that the data should be encrypted you could almost get away with just destroying the smartcards holding the master decryption keys, but it's probably best to be on the safe side with this.
> Melt them with thermite after the retention period is up. Done.
I get the feeling you've never done this before.
It's not possible to both leave data "on a given set of drives" and do anything useful with it too. If the data is going to be used for anything, ever, it's going to get copied all over the place.
It's OK if specific data gets copied out pursuant to a warrant. That's what I'd expect for law enforcement, counter-terrorism, etc., and that already happens with our current legal system for investigations. Somehow those don't seem to leak out all the time either.
The point is to ensure that wholesale illegal data mining would not occur.
> The point is to ensure that wholesale illegal data mining would not occur.
I believe the point being argued is to ensure that wholesale illegal data collection does not occur. Especially when that collection is pursuant to questionable warrants issued by a rubber-stamp court and secret interpretations of statutes that are intended to have the widest latitude possible.
The programs at issue here are quite unlike targeted evidence collection that results from standard warrants, against which not many at all are arguing.
Well I'm kind of playing devil's advocate a bit. Mass data mining, though I feel that it could be done safely and would be potentially useful, just strikes me as something beyond what we should expect the government to be doing.
However, it might even be Constitutional. But even with that I don't think government needs to be doing that anyways, and if Congress does feel that's a useful ability to have they should have the major telecoms themselves do it and require a warrant.
But I think for this discussion to advance in Washington it's not good enough to say what we don't want. I mean, I don't want to pay taxes either, but I do. I think we need to move instead to determining what we do want to happen, and having actual reasons behind those wants instead of just "RAH RAH GUBMINT BAD".
Yeah, I realized after continuing to work through your comments what you were doing.
I think there are definitely some issues about which we cannot adequately make decision by defining in the negative. But every so often, a question arises for which it is good enough for the public discussion to be stopped with a resounding, "NO. We don't want that." These programs, I think, are such an issue.
I'm happy to pay taxes and consider it to be a rational burden one ought to fulfill as a responsible citizen of any society. I simply don't like tax dollars going into programs like this, which I do not find meaningfully improve my quality of life, and do find it to violate the Constitution and reasonable expectation of privacy.
The NSA has been caught secretly recording everyone's communication for years, violating the 4th Amendment. James Clapper was caught lying under oath to Congress. Yet politicans are defending them. Who's going to have the power to enforce a retention policy when they're dealing with an agency that potentially has dirt on them, their friends, or their family?
Well the NSA claims (I'll stipulate "claims" as it's not as if I could check anyways) that they only hold it for 5 years.
Congress could enforce the matter by just not giving them money to build anything fancier though. Even the NSA has to obey information theory and physics.
Unless I am mistaken, that is only for a specific subset of data. The released policy also includes indefinite retention of encrypted data, even on Americans.
As far as budgets are concerned, when is the last time anything in the intelligence budgets was significantly cut that it affected their operating capabilities?
No, it is not.
It is not the least bit possible to both collect and protect this massive amount of wide net and graph data for our lifetimes.
Even if you believe that our government is completely benign to you and your family, governments change. I want my kids to live to be 100 years old. It's not possible to have lived 100 years without having lived through either the Civil War or McCarthyism (or both).
> For instance, keeping terrorism from becoming so prevalent that the people act for the police state we all want to prevent is a pretty big motivator by itself.
I get your point but this is basically Battered Spouse Syndrome you're arguing.