That just it, not even the Congresscritters of the Tea Party Caucus, who are at least nominally anti-government, are making an issue of NSA surveillance, so far as I’ve heard.
Never heard NSA’s budget called that before.
No cite, but I thought Rand Paul was bitching about it.
Rob
Well, they’re good for something, then.
The same reason doctors don’t suggest screening for all types of cancer for people of all ages several times a year:
- It’s expensive.
- It’s invasive.
- The rate of false positives is so high as to be counterproductive.
- False positives ruin people’s lives with no justification.
Let’s not pretend this is about letting “terrorists” get away with anything. It’s about not treating innocent people like terrorists.
Furthermore, free speech and assembly is chilled when there is no such thing as anonymity or privacy, and everything you say is stored and saved for any future (or current) enemy to use against you.
I think people don’t care that much (in general and on average) because they already suspected this was going on. It wasn’t really a huge surprise to many people.
In addition, most people just don’t care that much if the government reads their emails or checks their web habits.
Pork is a general term for budget items that help a rep at home and is used to buy his vote.
How does that apply to the NSA?
Does anyone know or have a guess?
Ugh…put it together based on the last two posts.
+1
When the entire system appears to be corrupt, and I think the argument lately is what kind of corruption and for who*, than if it is, most people just resign themselves to it. No scandal is too outrageous since people do expect them to happen, and as long as it doesn’t hit too close to home, or the damage is spreadout enough (case in point would be the LIBOR scandal - it happened at too high and obscure a level, and did not hit anyone in particular, but everyone for a few pennies that we never notice anyway.)
Plus we got burned out on all the minor scandals - from OJ Simpson to Tonya Harding at the birth of the 24-hour news cycle to crap about Bieber, Miley Cyrus and Rob Ford, people just tune it out and have no sense of scale since the media treats them all the same. Add in manufactured BS like the ‘War on Christmas’ and Benghazi and Whitewater, the average citizen doesn’t know how to care even when they think they should.
*The left thinks Big Business is the heart of the problem. The right thinks its Big Government is. Both are correct. Yet each side just wants to kill their bugbear, and thinks that is all that is necessary to solve the problem. And I know that is a very broad generalization of both sides, it is meant to be. The specifics would be a rehash of 10,000 other threads on those topics.
Because I just can’t get worked up over meta-data. If I believed they were listening to phone calls indiscriminately, I might be able to work up some outrage, but what number connected to what other number? Yawn.
What makes you think it’s only metadata? Communication over internet and its content have been under surveillance since at least 2007 through FISA.
It’s an issue, and I don’t support the snooping, but there are lots of issues and some are more important to people than this. If I were looking for a candidate to support I’d make sure they were pro-life and pro-second amendment before even considering how they stand on the surveillance.
If that was all of it then the Republicans would be all over this issue. But the reality is that both parties have been involved so neither party wants to make this a political issue.
Ya know, there are pills you could take for that.
To be honest, I don’t think the government really cares all that much either. (Unless you actually are involved in something like foreign terrorism, or might someday run for public office, or you’re a celebrity who’s a potential threat the status quo…thinking Nixon vs. Lennon here.) Surveillance, like any tool, can be abused by people in power, but that’s nothing new.
Additionally, while the tech does exist to maintain a persistent database of every pixel on the Internet at any given time (google “NarusInsight” if you’re bold enough) there’s simply not enough manpower to snoop into every single person’s life. Think about it, there’s 317,000,000+ American citizens (not to mention 7,000,000,000+ worldwide) to be covered by…how many NSA employees? Does anyone actually know?
News is coming out that the CIA spied on congress’s investigations against the CIA. This is explicitly against the CIA charter which forbids domestic intelligence.
It’s crazy that even news as big as this is barely causing ripples among the public. This is an intelligence apparatus that isn’t even pretending to respect the rule of law or the delegation of powers.
That’s what FISA is supposed to do. That is a good thing. I see no evidence of extra judicial phone taps. I have enough to worry about without imagining boogeymen listening to my phone calls.
I would not call the attitude of Congress and the the public to be a form of apathy.
Rather, it is an informed decision to grant our counterterror ops the widest possible latitude in their struggle to keep us from getting blown to smithereens. “Informed” by what, exactly? Informed by the international conspiracy of nightcreatures, ongoing for decades, of which 9/11 is only the most spectacular example.
OP limits the case to the American people, Congress, and NSA surveillance. Focusing on the public, what, exactly, has it lost? How many innocent Americans have lost their wealth or lives on account of NSA surveillance? Have any? It is the nightcreatures who, as we speak, are trying to take our wealth and lives away from us. We have weighed real (although almost universally unnoticeable on a personal level) loss of privacy against potential loss of wealth and life and have made a decision in favor of the potential. It is the right decision.