Turns out it’s all bullshit. Shocker, i know.
And you know this…how, exactly?
And I supported it when Bush was doing it, and support it now. 
Privacy is one of these weird cases where I find myself more in agreement with Bush than with most of my fellow leftists. I just don’t feel threateend by a government aggregating phone data. It doesn’t freak me out either viscerally or rationally.
“Big Brother” wasn’t scary because He was Watching. Big Brother was scary because you were punished for any deviation from the norm. If the government starts punishing people for thoughtcrimes, then absolutely that’s a problem–but surveillance just doesn’t bother me that much.
This attitude surprises me somewhat.
This is a government program that, if used honestly, is probably a net good, but if it’s abused would be terrible. If J. Edgar Hoover had access to everyone’s metadata, we probably would not have had a Martin Luther King, Jr.
So in order to evaluate it, we have to answer questions like: How easy is it to discover abuse? How likely is this form of abuse, historically? And by how much do the consequences of abuse of the program outweigh its benefits?
I think the answers here are “not likely,” “quite likely,” and “entirely unclear, but potentially by a lot,” respectively. Would I want someone like Sarah Palin to have this power at her fingertips? Do I trust the American political system to only repose power in those who I would trust with this power? I don’t see why I would.