If you're OK with revelations of NSA snooping, you're part of the problem

[leveymg]

240. I think a lot of people didn't understand what the NSA does, and simply trusted that they weren't

in the system.

There seems to be an unresolved tension between the 4th Amendment and technology. NSA operations may need to be more closely aligned with the former. Unless the system's operators can show that universal surveillance and retention of telecommunications has actually prevented great harm, and is necessary to continue doing so, then I see no reason to scrap the Bill of Rights to allow unlimited acqusition of all phone and email messages among Americans.

There's a better way to target terrorists. Don't allow them into the US, even the ones the CIA considers to be its own terrorists: e.g., the WTC '93 bombers, the 9/11 attack cell; the numerous and sundry al-Qaeda operatives attracted by Anwar al-Awlaki, and the Tsarnaev brothers. We really have to more closely control the CIA's own operatives, because these account for 90% of all the fatal mass casualty terrorist attacks in the US during the last several decades.