Replies

One, you completely ignored my post and the use by liberal groups of the phony lawsuit against conduit AT&T to try and damage perfectly legal and legitimate policy, just to get at administration, while thinking nothing about disclosing details of the program that has been successful in preventing terrorism.

Two, your use of "regardless of the fact that we have done nothing" implies that you don't differentiate between the crime and investigation and prosecution of it, and terrorism prevention. Remember the cries of "why didn't we do something, how could we not know before 9/11? The terrorists were right here." Well, we have been limiting the tools available to terrorism prevention, overseas and in the homeland while the same or even more intrusive tools have been available to and used by agencies like DEA and ATF.

I'd think libertarians would not object to rather unintrusive and bi-partisanly monitored tools be available for the prevention of terrorism rather than enforcement of alcohol, tobacco and firearm laws; liberals, apparently, would do the opposite - that's the difference. Liberals have given us some of the most restrictive laws in terms of speech and behavior that are supposed to make us "safer" from ourselves, yet wouldn't accept legal techniques used to prosecute what they consider "unacceptable" or "criminal" behavior in order to keep themselves safe from the people (terrorists) who hate their way of life and are intent on killing them. Strange, but I guess they only care about power, liberty be damned.

I didn't mean to ignore your post, I'm just stating that I don't like the idea of a government agency having that kind of access to civilian communications, because I think it will be eventually abused, and tied into systems like this. It may not happen now, but you can't tell me that the liberals won't try and push it to be used for much more than it is.

I'm completly fine if they have the proper warrants and oversight and are going after a particular target.

I'm not fine where a vacuum cleaner/fishing approach is used. We might as well setup roadblocks and have the feds search every single car that goes by, because it's the same thing - having access to the raw data/communications, rather than going to AT&T and saying "I need information on these IPs and these phone numbers, and here's the search warrant" sets off all kinds of flags.