[_cipher_]

I'm sitting in front of my keyboard for like 10 minutes trying to find where to start from... Honestly, I cannot.

> Can you imagine in the year 3,000, when the NSA's documents are ancient history, what kind of insight into the human condition, machinations, good guys, bad guys, plans, history, humanity can gain by seeing every single person's complete activity down to the second, down to when they were composing their thoughts?

Yes, it will be very pleasant - and exciting at the same time - to be able to view - and perhaps enjoy the same - activities of a person that searches for tentacle/eel porn.

[patcon]

Ditto. My first thought was to rage at the rationale behind that post, but I'm glad I stepped back to let it percolate. Scares the shit out of me that presumably normal and respectable and intelligent people see the situation that way...

[jacquesm]

It's the little helpers that are the problem, not the NSA per se, all those presumably normal, respectable and intelligent people that see nothing wrong with this are the heart of the matter.

Here in nl with some regularity the 'if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear' bull-shit gets trotted out and it is really aggravating but at the same time it helps to have a window into the minds of those that would be happy to live in a world like that.

Me, I'd rather see whole generations of criminals walk free than to see the world lose all those things that were hard-won not all that long ago.

Every thread like this eventually converges on comparisons with the former Third Reich and we tend to shy away from that comparison because obviously the differences are legion but at the same time you have to really worry what a future political powershift could do with the data they would have at their disposal. At a guess any resistance would be dead before they even got to first base.

[seanp2k2]

Except not even, because the data will never see the light of day, only hidden / stolen by bad actors. The only historical significance will be how huge of an over-reaction we had to 9/11 and the perceived threat of drugs.