In a day when pre-paid disposable cellphones (and phone numbers) are common place and can be purchased at your local 7-11, how beneficial can spying on the phone records of the entire general population really be?
My question on the NSA spying
Published by
What would you consider “beneficial”? If it stopped one attack and save 6 lives? 60 lives? 600 lives? how about 6 million lives?
I don’t have a cost-to-benefit ratio. Sorry.
I find it ironic that you seem to be willing to “give up” second amendments rights to save lives but less willing to give up the very fuzzily defined “privacy rights.”
While I do my best to avoid inconsistencies in my views — I also find 100% consistencies impossible, but I still strive towards the goal.
Yes, it is true that my life is full of ironies and hypocrisies. I’ve alluded to that many times.
But in this post I didn’t say if I was for or against the NSA spying.
My question was a simple one – in this day and age when you can cloak an IP address, buy disposable phones, etc. etc. is it really beneficial to spend the time, energy and resources to track EVERYONE’S information and go against their 4th amendment rights to find a few terrorists?
And in addition, while I am personally for the ultimate destruction of all weapons – I don’t foresee the 2nd amendment being un-ratified anytime soon and the proposals I’ve offered previously don’t limit your right (edit: as a law-abiding citizen) to own a gun.
You can read my thoughts here: http://casadeblundell.com/jonathan/if-obama-asked-me-about-gun-control/.
All I ask for is for you to get a background check, get proper training and register your guns and ammunition.
If you’re not worried about the government spying on you – you should have no problem with those checks…
A majority of the “terrorists” are not that sophisticated — they fail to use any (let alone good) encryption software and usually pay with credit cards. Of course they use own phones registered to them with real address. A good estimate is impossible to obtain, but a decent guesstimate is the NSA monitoring program may stop one “terrorist attack every 3 or 4 years.
I would like to see a national debate with an election — are we willing to give up some privacy to stop 1 attack every 4 years or not? Nothing will ever stop all attacks — at its very best this will only reduce them.
It is important that we understand that the NSA (and other Intelligence) organizations do NOT broadcast their success–if they said we stopped an attack because all phone calls to X are being monitored, even the stupid terrorist would stop calling X.
And you don’t see the irony in giving up 4th amendment rights in order to “reduce” terrorist attacks – while not wanting background checks, training and registration of guns to reduce those killed every day by guns?