Please check in if you oppose the massive surveillance being conducted on American citizens

[Mc Mike]

136. The ACLU is protecting our national security

by opposing the illegal elimination of the rights of the citizens of our nation. Those legal rights are what our nation is all about.

It's funny how the gov has to suspect all 300 million of us are potential terrorists, they have to know about every thing we do, due to 'national security'. While their actions are 'classified', so we can't know about anything they do, due to 'national security'. A complete inversion, since our national security actually should mean that our rights are secure, and that we citizens have oversight of our government's actions.

Post-er Yo Mama (post 83 above), and post-er Eridani on another thread, both brought up an excellent point -- collecting this huge volume of truly irrelevant information about hundreds of millions of innocent people is burying the few real important surveillance finds that our domestic spying apparatus might use to prevent terrorist attacks. So the massive surveillance programs defeat the stated purpose for their existence.

After 9/11, l'il bush (the ex-CIA director's son) made sure that nobody in the massive and expensive intel / surveillance apparatus of our nation had to answer for the obvious failure to safeguard national security. Instead, the key players were promoted and given medals. And the 'obvious' answer to the catastrophe was successful demands that their already bloated budgets be hugely augmented. That's like fire-fighters showing up to a blazing building and pumping gasoline on it, then getting medals for their actions and a big budget increase to buy more 'fire-fighting' equipment.