PRISM was an effective program and a good balance with civil liberties. Snowden should go to jail.

[cheapdate]

87. Maybe you meant your reply to someone else.

My earlier comment took no position on the issue and it's hard to see how you could possibly draw so many conclusions about my beliefs based solely on it.

But for argument sake, I'll assume you meant your comments for me. Your premise is that the acts and circumstances of the Bush administration's surveillance programs and the Obama administration's are the same, or substantially so.

The differences have been noted in great detail elsewhere -- the Bush administration was actually using wiretaps, the Obama administration isn't, the Bush administration was gathering information without a court approval, the Obama administration has court approval, the laws that were in place under Bush are not the same laws that are in place under Obama, etc.

Are they the same? I'm not so sure. The details are complicated, contested, uncertain, clouded in secrecy, etc.

But I would make a bet that there is not a single, serious person in the DU community that would dispute the proposition that the laws governing surveillance desperately need to be dramatically changed.