Is it ok For the NSA to spy on us?
I don't just mean Americans, this is a growing issue globally.
In June 2013 Edward Snowden released thousands of classified documents to the public via the Wikileaks website before flying out of the US to Russia were he sought asylum.
One of the most controversial aspects of this release was the knowledge that the NSA (National Security Agency) and the US Government had been spying, not only on their own citizens but also on the rest of the world.
It was also released that not only do they share this information with other intelligence agencies but that other countries have their own divisions of eavesdroppers such as GCHQ (Government Communications HeadQuarters) in the UK.
All in the goal of stopping terror.
The NSA have admitted that no large-scale terrorist action has been stopped due to the work they do but believe that the threat of them listening reduced the number of attacks.
Is it ok?
If we could trust them, then I'd support it. Unfortunately, they've been known to abuse this power.
But perhaps even more important than the snooping is the cost. We spend way more money snooping on people when the risk of not snooping is much smaller than other risks that we spend very little on. For example, cancer research.
How many people die every year from cancer versus terrorism? Why do we spend so much more money fighting terrorism than we do fighting cancer?
The answer is pretty clear to me: corruption. Nobody is going to get rich fighting cancer because there's no short term solution. But selling surveillance equipment and services is very easy to sell in the near term. Somebody is getting rich off of the fear of Americans. And that somebody is bank rolling Capitol Hill.
There has been monitoring as long as there have been methods to monitor.
In the US at least the arrangement used to be that the monitoring wasn't sanctioned, wasn't really admissible for much outside the intelligence community and therefore was done in secret, and the information gained was only used when it was worth tipping your hand.
We pretty much screwed that up with the last administration allowing the programs to continue after they were well known.
As dumb as it sounds at first pass a whole bunch of false outrage while funding the replacement program in secret is probably exactly what we need right now.