Fair enough. But holding the agency responsible for executing its mission within constraints applied to it, to the extent of constraints applied to it, by those responsible for creating those laws (congress) and directing the agency (executive branch) is not the correct way. People said ZOMG terrorism, help us, continued to elect the folks who cotrol the budget and direction, and now are blaming others for the result.
The problem still exists as a wheat/chaff problem, with the chaff being the lawful comms of US citizens. Unfortunately, the bulk of -global- traffic goes through the US, be it merely as data routed straight through, or served/cached/operated on by US commercial entities along the way, and as such, is mixed with our traffic. BY DEFINITION, even attempting to discriminate between foreign and domestic traffic requires "monitoring" (as the term has been extended in this case) of source/destination metadata.
And therein lies the rub--it is IMPOSSIBLE to lawfully select out legal (eg foreign) data WITHOUT observing the metadata of domestic traffic.
In the past, when communications weren't pocket switched, over terrestrial fiber, such discrimination were possible without observation of domestic metadata, but the very nature of modern communications makes it impossible to do so now.
Again, I return to my point regarding metadata--without observation of the metadata it is impossible to even divide the data into "okay to observe" (foreign) and illegal (domestic), so the very nature of our modern communications have created a defacto situation of either observing all of the metadata or none of it. As the latter makes the probability of success zero, the best and most privacy respecting method is to observe the legally allowed level of metadata, if only to -prevent- the observation of private data.
If you eliminate the ability to observe source/destination, how can you possibly determine which data is legal or not. So when calling for zero government observation of metadata, you are in effect stating that you would rather have zero intelligence gathering on communication of foreign sources, than to have that metadata be used to prevent monitoring of domestic communications and allow for appropriate targeting of observation-allowable data.
Blame IP and packet switched networks if you must, but that is the genesis of this problem.
Yep. A good number of Americans do act surprised when they demand X, and get the obvious consequences of it. Tis why some of us tried to be the voice of reason. "Your bath tub is more dangerous than Al Qaeda", "Old people driving have killed a hundred times as many folks as all terrorists combined.", "You people wanting to give Bush all this power are gonna be REAL pissed when the next President uses it against YOU.", etc
As Captain Malcolm Reynolds, it's a real burden being right so often. The right answer is to objectively assess situations and respond according. We both know THAT ain't ever happening, politically. So smarter bureaucrats should do their best to appease the guineafowl, while actually trying to take care of the problem in a way that doesn't create worse problems. A rogue intelligence agency, hostile to the population supporting it, is a worse problem. Like a rogue military unit or government agency, things can go off the rails in very short order for the best of intentions. Thankfully that's rare here in the US. We can only keep it that way through eternal vigilance.
There is "we try very hard to only collect foreign material, and dump any US citizen comms immediately and permanently" and
"We use metadata ONLY to make sure we are complying with the law and not spying on you by accident." And then there is "We are intentionally targeting US citizens".
Putting a pen register on the entire country, or at least Verizon, AT&T and Sprint, is not likely to be accidental collection or to use metadata for filtering purposes. It's systematic targeting of the citizenry footing the bill. That's a Real Bad Idea. If illegal, it must be punished. If "legal" under federal laws, it's certainly not under the 4th Amendment and should be correctly identified as such in very short order. I can think of near zero circumstances where a judge should sign a subpoena for the call records of our entire country and not be immediately removed from office. Metadata is already given the lowest form of legal protection under the law and judicial process. However, "lowest" is not "none", and should never BE "none".
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. (Incidentally, they do serve beer there, in case folks were wondering. Some very attractive young ladies too.) I honestly do think most NSA folks think of their mortgage and career first, but are very decent persons. That's all Americans. The brass are being paid the medium bucks to use good judgment when deciding strategic moves. Good brass knows how to interpret orders in a way to avoid really stupid and/or illegal activities.
I and most Americans would be fine with risky data being collected by the NSA in order to prevent Real Bad Things, provided there was extremely strong oversight to ensure things didn't go Full Retard. It is strongly looking like NSA went 3/4th Retard. Probably not Full Retard, but we don't know and we're told we can't ask. Other hand is valid lack of trust. Respectfully, POTUS, Congress and intel folks don't have a lot of credibility when they say "Trust us, everything is peachy."
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