"NONE of this would have happened without the revelations by Edward J. Snowden"

[randome]

85. Of course the government has the capacity to do almost anything. That's not going to change.

The Information Age isn't going to go away, either.

So long as there are strong safeguards to prevent abuse, I don't see that Snowden's run through Europe was worth the trouble.

The point of having the metadata available makes sense to me. They can query it to find potential co-conspirators. And if they don't have it, then they need to go to every telecom in the country to find that information.

If the Boston Bombers had not been American citizens, the NSA might have been suspicious enough to have prevented the bombing. Who knows?

Standard law enforcement procedures are to question anyone they think might be related to a known criminal. And you don't need a warrant to question someone. But before you can question someone, you need to find them.

You see it on TV all the time: "Excuse me, is Mr. Smith in? We'd like to ask him some questions about last night. No? Well, do you know where he might be, then?"

That is probably how the metadata is being used, although it's said that it hasn't been used to actually stop any terrorist attack.

How is what the NSA is doing any different from what a cop on TV does?
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