US intelligence mining data from 9 US Internet companies in broad secret program
I think it's interesting to ask why these programs are so widely hated.<p>These are national security assets: evidence gathered here will never be used in a drug case, or a tax evasion case.  Why not?  These tools exist for the bigger fish: the dozens of Soviet-era nuclear weapons believed to be missing, or the small amounts of  dangerous pathogens that periodically vanish from research labs.  These are what the government is worried about, and they're not going to risk revealing their methods for something lesser.<p>Warren Buffet has predicted a major nuclear terrorist attack on an American city to be a "virtual certainty" given enough time.<p>Ok, but no one here is going to argue that stopping <i>terrorism</i> is bad: the problem is in how we define terrorism.  What happens when the definition becomes progressively wider?  What counts as "terrorism" is political, after all.<p>It's important to remember that we still have a functioning democracy.  If you -- Hacker News reader -- decided to run for congress tomorrow, you might not win, but you won't be killed, sabotaged, or secretly blocked.  While some individual politicans may be corrupt, the system broadly is not.  These programs are enforcement mechanisms; the laws themselves are still made by the people, and maybe corporations.  While we as a population may argue about social issues like gay marriage and abortion, our government is not fascist.<p>Further, I take these programs as a great example that security is much harder to create than it is to destroy.  Extreme efforts such as these may still be insufficient to prevent New York from being destroyed by terrorists.  In that case, the acts of a few crazy people still overcame a monumental effort by the entire intelligence apparatus.  What does that say about the time Hacker News is so afraid of, when it's more than only a few crazy people that the government is "worried about"?<p>Should these programs exist?  I don't know.  I'm as worried as anyone about the scope creep.  I'm willing to accept a level of inherent danger with living in a free society.  However, do not forget that we can't see NSA success stories.  I might be willing to accept a risk of periodic car bombs, which while tragic are not statistically significant; however, if PRISM is actually effective at tracing and intercepting Soviet nuclear weapons, I can see multiple sides of this issue.<p>We have rights to privacy and protection from unreasonable search and seizure.  Those rights were created to prevent unfair loss of life, liberty, and property.  These programs, hidden in the background, don't inconvenience you, or lead to loss of freedom or property.  Is privacy good?  Of course.  But the incentives the intelligence apparatus have to not use any data collected here against anyone for reasons less than "real" terrorism are strong enough, that I think it's not open-and-shut.