I'd had that thought too, about the time I posted, jokingly, that I'd switch to Qwest. There's something fishy about a telco not participating when you have to assume the Feds leaned heavily on the other three. One might even make the case, if one were prone to a police state mentality, that switching to Qwest is the sign of a guilty conscience. Never mind genuine concern for principles and American freedom, those are null concepts to the mind of a secret policeman.
I'd echo Tony and ask how a Libertarian can be so blase about this. A mass of raw phone records which is only useful for divining patterns of relationships is the ultimate tool of a police state. It lets the State get the goods on private indiscretions and embarrassing information--like who's having an affair with who--and use it for blackmail. It's entirely about guilt-by-association. There is nothing about the technique of pattern analysis that restricts its usage to catching terrorists. Data mining is the ultimate drift net, and the KGB and Gestapo would have given the secret policeman's other ball to have a system like this.
Is your defense just knee-jerk inertia? Will your Libertarian principles catch up to your Republican loyalty some day?
Current Events » in reply to re: The New York Times article from last December
Honey pots
The whole thread (69 posts)
- The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans
- Here is something interesting - good or bad?
- re: The New York Times article from last December
- HIgh crimes and misdemeanors
- Brace for spin
- Tens of millions of Americans?