I think it just comes down to the trade off of freedom vs. loss of life.

I mean that's what it's really about, isn't it? We are giving up the freedom of privacy for the potential of more security?

Yet, This is not the American Way

At one point we realized that in order to protect the freedoms of our people we had to die. That's why so many fought in the revolutionary war. To protect our rights and freedoms as citizens against the State (England, at the time).

If we just lay down like dogs now and let our government walk over us like dogs, all those lives will have been wasted.

So I'll believe that they stopped something when they produce the details for the press to investigate.

For example, if TSA being onerous convinces a significant number of people to drive for their medium distance trips instead of fly, more people will die because driving is more dangerous than flying.

Also, it's not exactly a 1-to-1 comparison, but for every 700,000 hours(ish) you force people to wait or delay their day in some fashion, you're causing an entire lifetime of inconvenience. It's better than taking an infant from its mother and shooting it, but it's still taking an entire lifetime of potential and destroying it through boredom and frustration.

I know I'm leaning pretty heavy on TSA examples here, but we've also seen they can't even reliably stop weapons from coming through security in predictable and repeatable ways. So, "we" decided that a trade off between security and freedom was prudent, we implemented that trade off, and then we found out we only received the downsides and none of the upsides.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/public-documents-contradict...

Precrime is already here and nobody is batting a damned eyelid.

For that amount, they should be saving in the order of 40,000 people's lives from terrorism a year to justify the spending.

(I've plucked the intervention per life-year saved from here: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/UCSBpf/readings/inter...

and assumed each life-save has 50 potential years of their life left)

If the NSA had a hypothetical program that didn't infringe on anyone's rights (likely impossible, but bear with me), but did consistently stop terrorist plots when they arose, even if all of the successful plots may kill a few dozen or a hundred people in total, most people would agree that spending $80 billion on that program is worth it due to the lives saved.

I don't personally think that $80 billion being spent to protect lives is wasteful, generally speaking. I do see how it is wasteful in this situation, because it has very questionable results, and when the collateral damage of the plan is so incredibly great.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Etm4dHdaApo

    13 dead
    30 + wounded

When you point out the failures of the NSA to stop specific instances of terrorism, it only suggests that they need more resources and legal surveillance. The reasons for wanting the NSA surveillance to stop have to be that the innumerable injustices suffered by citizens under a surveillance state would be worse than the occasional extremist attack that would be preventable under such surveillance.

If it were the Stasi, Gestapo, or NKVD that noticed an Army major communicating with a Resistance element for any reason you'd have been able to count the remainder of that major's life in hours. FBI, on the other hand, went "Meh, not enough evidence to start an investigation".

So be careful about the conclusion you draw from that. All you've really said is that we currently have handcuffs too tight on the NSA and FBI.

There are much better reasons to oppose this than "To me it looks like they didn't stop every attack so it is useless".

Like someone else said, we have no idea how much crap they actually catch, maybe the boston incidence is just one instance out of many others that were prevented.

I'm not American, so I can't really speak to the domestic angle. I am immensely concerned about the foreign angle, however -- if the US government can secretly demand information from firms like Google or Apple, that is extremely concerning from an espionage perspective (economic or otherwise). Every government of Canada employee involved in the F-35 procurement process (or the Keystone XL pipeline, or any other multinational discussion), for instance, hopefully don't carrying Android or iOS or Windows OS devices (back when Obama carried a Blackberry, a Microsoft rep pointed out how dangerous this was having the president carrying a foreign device. Every other nation on Earth needs to heed those words). Even if communications were end-to-end encrypted, simply knowing where each of the people were and who they communicated with -- without knowing the contents of those communications -- would provide simply enormous data to effectively flank any position.

It is ironic to look back to when Chinese firms like Huawei see great suspicion, when we know that the free and democratic United States may be just as dangerous.

Ugh.. what terrible reasoning. The absence of data is not somehow possible data.

>pointing out the failure in the Boston bombing is a poor counterpoint given that to many it would suggest that increased surveillance is necessary, not less.

It's actually a rather good counter point. It shows that the FBI/NSA/big brother already can't process all of the data it has in a meaningful amount of time. How does adding more data to sift through help? Unless there's some benevolent, magical AI that can pick terrorist patterns out of a colossal sea of data, I fail to see how more data is the solution.

When you don't HAVE the data, it is nonsense to make conclusions as if you have the data, which is exactly what you and others are doing. Terrible reasoning indeed.

shows that the FBI/NSA/big brother already can't process all of the data

Once again -- no data (you have absolutely no idea what data they have or don't have), but you can declare that the problem is processing data.

There is a trend here.

Well, that's not really true:

The FBI has confirmed that Russia alerted the agency in 2011 that Tsarnaev had ties to 'radical Islam' groups in his homeland. Homeland Security sources have also revealed the agency received tips in 2012 about his ties to extremists connected to a Boston mosque. (...) Tamerlan was said to have been named as one of the radicals that came to attention of an informant working with an agency attached to the Boston-area Joint Terrorism Task Force

When you don't have the data and the data is kept completely hidden from you, the only reasonable course of thought is to assume that the data does not exist or is completely and totally flawed. When the NSA or gov't asserts that its data collection is protecting you, they must provide the evidence so that such a statement could be examined. If they do not provide such data, you can't assume anything about its existence or even its existence in the first place.

just saying

And that is the problem. Zero accountability to the very populace they are taking liberties away from.