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.