Is it a scandal when you assumed it was secretly happening?

@Imadethisupwithnoforethought I’ve been wondering the same thing.

But…they’ve been doing it for 7 years already. Bush initiated that.

No, I am not concerned.

I’m neither surprised or concerned.

I am disgusted though. Whatever happened to civil liberties?

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Benjamin Franklin.

Not at all surprised. I pretty much assumed it was happening, and had been for a long time. Is it right? No.

I’m not doing anything wrong.. I fucking hate that argument.

Who knows what Marco Rubio would define as wrong.

Google, Apple, and Facebook are using weasel words and saying that the report is wrong.

I don’t really believe them. I’m glad I have used self hosted email for about a year now and use DuckDuckGo for search.

I’ve just always figured that these things are logged somewhere, and that the government could access it if needed. The issue here is what constitutes a ‘need’ for an average citizen’s data trail to be examined. I would far prefer that a judge would have to review the case and asses the purpose before allowing it. On the other hand, with the population of our country being so large and so attached to our technology, I imagine that there might be a way to study patterns within the rats’ nest of data that could lead the authorities to people more inclined to perform criminal acts – I think that’s the premise behind the TV program ’Person of Interest’.

I don’t think of it as a new scandal. I do think it scandalous that the media chose not to report the abuses perpetrated under the guise of the Patriot Act from the get go. And the renewal of the Act should have raised everyone’s hackles. But no, we simply voted out the one guy who refused to vote it back in. I fear that my nieces and nephews will have even far fewer freedoms than I; and they don’t see the problem.

Nope, I’m not a terrorist and thus have nothing to hide. I don’t necessarily appreciate it or enjoy it, but if it’s the price I have to pay to keep our country safe, then I will. Privacy is a small sacrifice compared to soldiers risking their lives for all of us.

I don’t think this is any different than the government having had access to your land line phone bills, if the need arose, or ability to search your computer if it was warranted, or searching your home.

I’m not worried about it.

Slightly related tangent: Part of the Patriot Act was supposed to allow government access to circulation records so that they could see everything any person checked out. Almost all of the major software companies that make library cataloging software deliberately “broke” their software so it’s not possible to keep circulation records of what individual people check out. This was to protect our civil liberties and to protect librarians from getting in trouble if any agency demanded the circ records. Thank the ALA for this protection.

I have nothing to hide, but I enjoy my constitutionally protected rights to privacy and don’t like to see them trod upon.