Jimmy Carter Defends Snowden, Says U.S. Has No "Functioning Democracy"

[JDPriestly]

24. Again, a government apologist if not agent, hijacked this thread to talk about this time,

the reporter rather than about the inexcusable extent of the gathering of metadata and eavesdropping being operated by the NSA.

Hijacking does not deal with issues. It distracts. Distraction is a Republican strategy to prevent discussion of important issues.

Let's get this back on track. I posted a photo of Carter speaking from his seat in the audience at the event. Carter has not denied that he made the statements attributed to him.

Now, back to our program. What do we do about the NSA's over-reaching surveillance and collection of metadata. I differentiate the two and include both because another NSA method for changing the topic in the conversation is claiming it only collects metadata. Your metadata is your life. You don't want the government to have it.

The apologists of this program say, well, private companies have it. If they can have it, it must not be private. A private company is not going to study your metadata in order to silence your political or religious or scientific or whatever opinions. That would not be profitable for a private company.

Only the government can take the tax money you pay (whether directly or indirectly when you buy products, etc.) and use that money to fund a huge, boondoggle surveillance program that does nothing other than increase the government's information about you and therefore its power to control, influence and perhaps punish you.

That's why you can trust the phone company with your information. The shareholders would squawk and loudly, and some thriftier person out there would take over the company if they simply collected your metadata and analyzed with a billion-dollars' worth of equipment and manpower.

So, that is why we don't want the government doing this. When you ask why they are collecting all that metadata on everyone, every man, woman and child in America, you see that the purposes cannot be worth the investments being made.