N.S.A. Director: it's not that what we're doing is wrong, it's that we did a bad job explaining it

Then let me be explicit. Let us please defend our constitutional rights. That means punishing those who violate them and rewarding those who do. If people want to give away their rights then it has to be done legally.

I love how you just blindly assert they are acting unconstitutionally without any citation or any reference to what they are doing that violates the constitution, and how.

I mean, they are clearly doing things that are highly dubious, and at least one FISC judge has questioned the constitutionality of some of their actions, but unsupported blanket assertions only resonate with those already in the echo chamber (which, unfortunately, seems to be most of those who visit these forums).

My comments are based solely on dweller_below’s use of the Brandeis quoted sentence above. I believe that Brandeis intended it to suggest a clear way to identify “the greatest dangers”. My point is solely that identifying these dangers (in the form of enchroachments by men of zeal) is not as easy as the quote suggests it might be.

What they are doing is unconstitutional. At a minimum we should be very, very suspicious of people in power doing crap like this. Well, I take that back. I care about the fourth amendment but I am realizing not everyone does. I also fear secret government. Again, I realize not everyone does. We have more to fear from government run amok than from so-called terrorists.

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It’s not just that you’re doing a bad job of explaining it; it’s that when you try to explain things using the method popularly called “lying through your teeth”, some people aren’t going to believe the specific lies you’re telling, and some people aren’t going to know which things you’re telling are lies, but have seen you get caught lying enough times that they’ll assume you’re lying about the rest of it. And even if some of the things you’re saying are true, in some very narrowly interpreted sense, that doesn’t mean they’re not also lies.

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The very article you post says that they are no longer doing the acts that were deemed unconstitutional, so at the moment it’s not clear that “[w]hat they’re doing is unconstitutional.”

As I said, I think they’re doing things that are definitely suspect. But lots of what they’re doing seems to be supported by existing, non-secret (i.e., non-FISC) law. Simply blaming the NSA doesn’t address things like the Patriot Act, which democratically authorised a lot of things that many people are uncomfortable. Blaming agencies won’t fix the Patriot Act.

Intelsplaining

…nobody told them the facts of the program.

Yeah, well, that whole “we don’t need to explain ourselves” attitude just may be to blame there, combined with the revelations that their “controls,” where they exist at all, and where they are respected, are woefully inadequate. Most of those controls boil down to self-control, which is never a good idea in government.

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“If our nation of Constitution and Law is to survive, we can not ignore this danger”

But our nation is not supposed to survive. We’re heading back into the 18th century.

The 12,400 oligarchs think that there’s already too many people alive, so…

Alexander just doesn’t get it. What they’re doing IS wrong. Their safeguards are nice, but they’re completely voluntary. They can decide at any time to break their own rules, which they have on many occasions.

It’s really depressing to realize Big Brother is really watching. No online data is secure nowhere no how. If you keep it in your home, they still need a warrant to get to it. So far, the best way to keep your stuff safe from prying eyes is to get a private cloud, like a Cloudlocker (www.stoamigo.com) that works like a regular cloud service but stays at home. Look for more inventions like this to help protect us from the people supposed to protect us.

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“Nobody told them the facts of the program and the controls that go around it.”

They must not have told Snowden about those controls either.

Let’s take the NSA’s argument as the truth. That would mean that the people in charge of going to secret courts, with secret laws, and presenting a case on gathering all of this secret data on the citizenry aren’t capable of truthfully explaining what they are doing and why.

If that’s the case, then the agency is run by people not capable of performing their duties and therefore should be removed.

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