a machine for spying on americans. oh, ok, yeah, and foreign terrorists, too.
our constitution was not based on punishing the british, nor was it even based on punishing the new government for the misdeeds of the british, though those misdeeds certainly inspired much of the original ideas. it was designed instead to set up institutions carefully balanced against each other in order to provide an built-in mechanism to keep excesses in check.
our founders understood that without effective checks and balances, government will eventually overreach what is right, fair, and reasonable, until it is somehow stopped. and if an institutional remedy is not available, the results will be ugly.
much of the discussion around our government's current breathtaking scope of communication monitoring has centered on such things as whether or not rights already have been violated, who knew what when and lied about it, and whether or not this level of government-looking-over-your-shoulder is justified by the extra safety and security all this monitoring hopefully offers.
but our founders were always far more concerned with what *could* eventually happen, and good governance requires a thoughtful peek into the future whenever setting up institutions and procedures.
so put aside what has already happened and what is happening right now and imagine a world in the not-too-distant future. whatever your political identity may be, imagine that the oval office is occupied by a member of the opposite party, and imagine that this person is strongly motivated to increase their own power as well as the power of their party. certainly not much of a leap.
whether or not certain rotten things have taken place, the technology and institutions set up, as far as we know, make domestic spying incredibly easy. keep in mind that government now has truly massive amounts of information at its fingertips. also keep in mind that the government can focus its search of that massive information however it likes, without oversight.
could the government search its metadata to find information about political opponents? in a way that disproportionately targets members of one race or religion or another? or one political party or another? of course it could, and there's quite a lot that could be gleaned only from metadata. the president could use this mechanism to unearth scandalous material about political opponents. it couldn't be leaked directly, but one phone call to a private detective could provide an "innocent" way for the scandal to come out.
worse, the government could also use the metadata to get a search warrant for voice/text details. but there's oversight for that, right? well, there is a nominal institutional set-up for that, yes, ineffective as it currently appears to be. but let's say that this gets fixed and there's more of a real hearing and a "liberties" defender in the process. unfortunately, it's far too easy for the government, with all this massive data at hand, to bamboozle the process and win whenever it cares too. they can target a few people for scrutiny for political reasons, but then when it's time to get a search warrant, they can present an entirely different case to the fisa court.
here's how. chances are really, really good that whoever they are targeting, they can paint a picture with metadata to cast enough suspicion on them to justify a search warrant -- if suspicion is all that's needed, and apparently it is. if the opposing candidate's the target, surely he has had a conversation with someone who has also had a conversation with someone in a questionable country. remember that we're all only about 6 hops away from each other, and for politicians that number is much smaller because they talk to so many people, and many of those people talk to many people as well.
so the government wants to listen in on the opposing candidate's conversation, it finds a pizza delivery place that's taken orders from both that candidate's campaign and an Iranian immigrant who sells fertilizer and viola, you've got a search warrant. for further disguise, the government could expand the list to include hundred if not thousands of similar people. the fisa court wouldn't notice that a few of them happen to be high-profile political opponents. just caught up in the big list, i guess. then the government goes back, closes the door, and listens in on political conversations from the one or two true targets, and ignores the other names in the search warrant.
i have my suspicion that this has already happened, certainly under shrub, but that's not the point. the point is that this *will* happen because we have no effective way to prevent it and the temptation is simply too great and the means far too easy.
*that* is the problem and *that* is why i object to the gathering of all this information.