Do we need to institute the NSA "spy" system?

[IndependentinWis]

Snow leaked the information that the NSA was "spying" on us, reading our emails and messages and listening in on our telephone calls. The question I have is would have the NSA spying increased the chance that we would have discovered the threat in San Bernadino before it happened and allowed us to keep it from happening. My answer would be YES. I had no problem with the government listening in on my phone calls and reading my emails and messages. I mean would I care if they found out I didn't like the coach of the Green Bay Packers, I don't think I would have. People out there think that more weapons in our hands make us safer, but I think more information is a better deterrent to this kind of attack. While this kind of "spying" might bring fear into the hearts of some who are doing something wrong, many Americans don't fear it and feel safer with it going on. What do you think?

 

[Max R.]

Trading liberty for security is always a path to failure.

Best just to grow a spine.

 

[IndependentinWis]

Trading liberty for security is always a path to failure.

Best just to grow a spine.

I volunteered for the military and served, I have a spine, do you? The problem I have is that I fear those with guns, be they muslim or white supremacist, in this country more than some unknown terrorist outside this country.

 

[IndependentinWis]

Trading liberty for security is always a path to failure.

Best just to grow a spine.

And I find it interesting that conservatives came up with the plan for the NSA spying, and now complain about it. Makes me chuckle. And don't tell me that Obama took it too far, it went as far as it did because of the plans made for it by the conservatives that originally came up with the idea. I applaud those people.

 

[Max R.]

I volunteered for the military and served, I have a spine, do you? The problem I have is that I fear those with guns, be they muslim or white supremacist, in this country more than some unknown terrorist outside this country.

I served a career in the military. You admit to living in fear, I do not live in fear of Muslims or racist rednecks much less my neighbors.

The odds of any of them committing such a crime are extremely low. Do the math.....and stop living in fear. Fear makes people do stupid shit like pass the Patriot Act.

 

[Max R.]

And I find it interesting that conservatives came up with the plan for the NSA spying, and now complain about it. Makes me chuckle. And don't tell me that Obama took it too far, it went as far as it did because of the plans made for it by the conservatives that originally came up with the idea. I applaud those people.

LOL. I find it funny Left Wing Loonies are still blaming Booooosh for this when 1) it was passed by vast majority of Democrats and 2) extended by President Obama, including the NSA spying you mentioned.

 

[Arkady]

Snow leaked the information that the NSA was "spying" on us, reading our emails and messages and listening in on our telephone calls. The question I have is would have the NSA spying increased the chance that we would have discovered the threat in San Bernadino before it happened and allowed us to keep it from happening. My answer would be YES. I had no problem with the government listening in on my phone calls and reading my emails and messages. I mean would I care if they found out I didn't like the coach of the Green Bay Packers, I don't think I would have. People out there think that more weapons in our hands make us safer, but I think more information is a better deterrent to this kind of attack. While this kind of "spying" might bring fear into the hearts of some who are doing something wrong, many Americans don't fear it and feel safer with it going on. What do you think?

I think we have a Constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, and I think this should properly be interpreted to mean no spying on anyone without reasonable individualized suspicion (a reason to believe that specific person, or whoever he is communicating with, has committed a specific crime) -- with checks and balances on that call, by way of a warrant requirement from a genuinely independent judicial authority. Yes, I know this constitutionalist approach to the question makes keeping us safe from terrorists and other criminals more difficult. So be it. The alternative puts into the government's hands a dangerous amount of discretion and moves us down the road to totalitarianism. I hope we, as a people, aren't so cowardly as to be stampeded into that.

 

[Max R.]

I think we have a Constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, and I think this should properly be interpreted to mean no spying on anyone without reasonable individualized suspicion (a reason to believe that specific person, or whoever he is communicating with, has committed a specific crime). Yes, I know this constitutionalist approach to the question makes keeping us safe from terrorists and other criminals more difficult. So be it. The alternative puts into the government's hands a dangerous amount of discretion and moves us down the road to totalitarianism. I hope we, as a people, aren't so cowardly as to be stampeded into that.

Agreed 100%, but as @IndependentinWis and others on this forum often propose, they'd rather trade liberty for the illusion of security because they are in fear.

That attitude isn't good for them in the long run much less good for the nation.

 

[Arkady]

Agreed 100%, but as @IndependentinWis and others on this forum often propose, they'd rather trade liberty for the illusion of security because they are in fear.

That attitude isn't good for them in the long run much less good for the nation.

It's a trade off, to be sure. I don't doubt that in the short term we're safer with government having greater discretion to spy on us. But, in the long-term, we're less safe, and so we'd be fools to empower government this way.

I might possibly come down the other way on this if the hits we'd been taken were massive enough to turn those short-term considerations into a major crisis. This is why, although I opposed the Patriot Act, I gave politicians who initially supported it a free pass. In the wake of 9/11, a little panic was understandable, and since they'd had the good sense to pass it as a sunsetting law, it was at least framed as a short-term emergency measure that would go away on its own. The renewal of it, and the revamping of FISA in 2008, irked me more, since by then cooler heads ought to have prevailed.

So far, the terrorist threat just isn't sufficient to justify this kind of radical reworking of our civil liberties. How many Americans have been killed by terrorists? Maybe 10,000 if you combine all of them in our history. Guns kill about that many every three or four months, and obesity kills that many ever week or two. If we can justify dramatic expansion of government powers and discretion based on the minor mortality associated with terrorism, imagine what could be done for more serious threats to the lives of the American people, like fast food.

 

[Max R.]

It's a trade off, to be sure. I don't doubt that in the short term we're safer with government having greater discretion to spy on us. But, in the long-term, we're less safe, and so we'd be fools to empower government this way.

I might possibly come down the other way on this if the hits we'd been taken were massive enough to turn those short-term considerations into a major crisis. This is why, although I opposed the Patriot Act, I gave politicians who initially supported it a free pass. In the wake of 9/11, a little panic was understandable, and since they'd had the good sense to pass it as a sunsetting law, it was at least framed as a short-term emergency measure that would go away on its own. The renewal of it, and the revamping of FISA in 2008, irked me more, since by then cooler heads ought to have prevailed.

So far, the terrorist threat just isn't sufficient to justify this kind of radical reworking of our civil liberties. How many Americans have been killed by terrorists? Maybe 10,000 if you combine all of them in our history. Guns kill about that many every three or four months, and obesity kills that many ever week or two. If we can justify dramatic expansion of government powers and discretion based on the minor mortality associated with terrorism, imagine what could be done for more serious threats to the lives of the American people, like fast food.

While you and I are agreed weakening our Constitutional rights is bad for the nation, you still seem to dance along the line that, if our safety were in question, that it would be permissible to become an authoritarian/martial law state.

Even if we lost half of our population, if we shred our Constitution, we're no longer Americans. We're just shrieking, shivering, spineless sheep waiting for "daddy" to save us by ruling with an iron fist.

Better to die free than live forever in a prison of our own making.

 

[Craig]

It's a trade off, to be sure. I don't doubt that in the short term we're safer with government having greater discretion to spy on us. But, in the long-term, we're less safe, and so we'd be fools to empower government this way.

I might possibly come down the other way on this if the hits we'd been taken were massive enough to turn those short-term considerations into a major crisis. This is why, although I opposed the Patriot Act, I gave politicians who initially supported it a free pass. In the wake of 9/11, a little panic was understandable, and since they'd had the good sense to pass it as a sunsetting law, it was at least framed as a short-term emergency measure that would go away on its own. The renewal of it, and the revamping of FISA in 2008, irked me more, since by then cooler heads ought to have prevailed.

So far, the terrorist threat just isn't sufficient to justify this kind of radical reworking of our civil liberties. How many Americans have been killed by terrorists? Maybe 10,000 if you combine all of them in our history. Guns kill about that many every three or four months, and obesity kills that many ever week or two. If we can justify dramatic expansion of government powers and discretion based on the minor mortality associated with terrorism, imagine what could be done for more serious threats to the lives of the American people, like fast food.

We've been running about 20K dead per year on prescription drug overdoses...

Death by any means other than "terrorism" is treated in amazingly apathetic fashion.

 

[Arkady]

We've been running about 20K dead per year on prescription drug overdoses...

Death by any means other than "terrorism" is treated in amazingly apathetic fashion.

There's a really great book from the 90s called "The Culture of Fear" that looks into why we fear certain things and not others. Terrorism, plane crashes, Halloween candy poisonings, mass shootings, child abductions by strangers, and a few other very-low-probability things get a whole lot of coverage and inspire deep panic, while things that are more mundane but vastly more consequential (more routine forms of deadly violence, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, car accidents, prescription drug overdoses, deaths associated with tobacco and alcohol) just kind of blend into the background.

 

[Craig]

There's a really great book from the 90s called "The Culture of Fear" that looks into why we fear certain things and not others. Terrorism, plane crashes, Halloween candy poisonings, mass shootings, child abductions by strangers, and a few other very-low-probability things get a whole lot of coverage and inspire deep panic, while things that are more mundane but vastly more consequential (more routine forms of deadly violence, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, car accidents, prescription drug overdoses, deaths associated with tobacco and alcohol) just kind of blend into the background.

Part of that goes to control issues. I am not flying the plane. Terrorism seems so random.

I am deciding to have a beer or big gulp or spend too much time on my rear instead of working out on my land and then enjoying a 12 ounce hamburger with fries in duck fat....

 

[Arkady]

Part of that goes to control issues. I am not flying the plane. Terrorism seems so random.

I am deciding to have a beer or big gulp or spend too much time on my rear instead of working out on my land and then enjoying a 12 ounce hamburger with fries in duck fat....

Yeah, I think the control and randomness factors are big. Another factor, discussed in the book, is class. Some threats strike closer to home for the kinds of people who make the decisions about what gets covered by the media. If you're the head of a news room living in New York City, farm accidents and mouth cancer from chewing tobacco are probably not big personal fears for you. But you may fly on planes very frequently, and you may frequent locations known to be high-profile terrorist targets. The kinds of things that keep you up at night, as a member of the cosmopolitan urban coastal elite, are going to get more coverage than things that are outside your personal experience.

For example, one of the ways the US could save the most American lives cheaply is creating more rural trauma centers. Suffering an accident in a rural area is far more likely to be deadly than in an urban area, because access to decent local trauma care is so much worse. Focusing there would save far more lives than, for example, further improving our already very safe commercial air transit system, or blowing more money on our hugely expensive "war on terror". But, the kinds of people who set the terms of our national discussion live very different lives than the statistical norm, so things look different from their perspective.

 

[Deleted member 21794]

Snow leaked the information that the NSA was "spying" on us, reading our emails and messages and listening in on our telephone calls. The question I have is would have the NSA spying increased the chance that we would have discovered the threat in San Bernadino before it happened and allowed us to keep it from happening. My answer would be YES. I had no problem with the government listening in on my phone calls and reading my emails and messages. I mean would I care if they found out I didn't like the coach of the Green Bay Packers, I don't think I would have. People out there think that more weapons in our hands make us safer, but I think more information is a better deterrent to this kind of attack. While this kind of "spying" might bring fear into the hearts of some who are doing something wrong, many Americans don't fear it and feel safer with it going on. What do you think?

How about government installing cameras in your home, just to make sure you're not harboring terrorists?