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In reply to the discussion: Sen. Al Franken: “I Assure You This Isn’t About Spying on the American People” [View all]JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)and make a copy would you like it?
And if I go to all the mailboxes in the city and do the same thing and then scan the bills and put the scanned bills in a computer that can compile the information available from them about who talks to whom, how often and what phone calls are made within so many minutes of each call. And if I do that analysis on every phone call and every person. And if in addition to all that, I peruse transcripts (we get them from Vonage [Skype] in our e-mails for missed calls) of all your calls and e-mails for specific words like wedding or funeral or whatever code words the NSA is looking for that might be commonly used by Americans, then would you like that?
And why do you want perfect strangers having all this information about you?
And why would the NSA get a court order requiring Verizon to collect all that information if they weren't planning to use it?
To trust a Senator who is, granted very smart, but a comedian and not a former intelligence officer or a lawyer or an expert on surveillance or even a historian, to judge the wisdom of the FISA program is not wise in my view. I want to know the opinions of experts on surveillance past and present, the former intelligence officers, the lawyers for the whistleblowers in previous cases and those whistleblowers themselves. Franken's opinion after having sat through a propaganda (maybe even psy-ops or brainwashing) session presented by the administration and the perpetrators of the NSA program really is not persuasive to me at all.
Neither is Obama's self-serving "White Paper." Seen things like that. Don't trust them at all. Think about all the wonderful things that have been said about the Keystone Pipeline and the gas fracking. Good people must stay skeptical. Especially when it comes to protecting our basic freedom of privacy. We have no freedom at all if we compromise that basic one.