My thoughts exactly, thanks for this refreshing blog post. There's definitely a lot of security value for the intelligence agencies to mine our data and they've been able to stop several terrorist plots because of being able to access that data. Like you said, I just wish they would be more transparent about it. Of course the other danger is that if they're too transparent, the people who WANT to be anonymous for bad reasons will know exactly how to avoid leaving digital trails. It's tough to balance privacy & security but I definitely think the intelligence agencies could care less about what drug dealers you talk to or how much porn you watch and legitimately care more about threats to the country.
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but I definitely think the intelligence agencies could care less about what drug dealers you talk to or how much porn you watch and legitimately care more about threats to the country.
That might be true today... but what about tomorrow? Or what if one individual at the NSA starts finding enough dirt on enough powerful people, to start exerting an undue degree of influence / control on our society? It's not like intelligence collected by government agencies has never been used for political purposes before.
I also disagree with their BS about it being "necessary" to collect ALL this data. I'm sorry, but if they're telling the truth about not collecting names, etc., then I do not believe they can detect "terrorist activity" by simply analyzing patterns of phone calls, durations, etc., among random people. And if their analysis is based on analyzing connections to and from already identified suspects, then all they need to do is get a warrant to collect information on people calling (or being called by) the known suspects.