A quote from Benjamin Franklin comes to mind: Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Yours have not been restricted. Freedom isn't always about YOU. Assuming you are white, for a moment, would you have disregarded the struggle for civil rights in the '50s and '60s because Jim Crow laws didn't restrict YOUR freedoms? Would you feel good about that decision today if you had?
There have been hundreds of cases discussed on this web site in which the the limitless security state has had a substantive impact on the lives of innocent people. Going beyond that, it is pretty clear that people change their behavior when they are being watched, and not for the better (https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=privacy%20nothin...).
Your liberties HAVE been reduced, you just haven't bumped into one of the new walls yet, or you didn't notice if you have.
The telephone company has little to no incentive to search through your telephone records and look for correlations. Further, the telephone company has no capability to correlate your Internet data to your phone records, to your physical mail, and come up with conclusions about you. The NSA does.
Huh? For many people your phone company, is their internet company. They already have your address (they have to deliver the cable to it) and your billing information.
The don't even need to do any fancy analytics. They have all your data served up on a platter.
As the poster noted, it's not as if the gov't is having to piece together data from thousands of sources. Almost all the metadata can be put together from a handful of sources.
I think the government is fundamentally different than a private company or semi-public utility. Their control of law enforcement and military forces are the most relevant here.
The government's monopoly on legal violence delegated to police and military (which are starting to blur together)
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ubiquitous spying capabilities only bounded by technology limits, finding clearance-passable bodies to wade through mountain ranges of data, keeping the lies plausibly deniable in front of Congress and containing waste of a sprawling bureacracy
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modern, horrible pattern of exceptionalism: disregarding any sense of morality, decency and/or due-process
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USG executive branch's de-facto dominant power position
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I'd agree at least until a single corporation has a market cap > 100% USG FY budget and/or the USG runs out of credit. Both seem essentially inevitable. (beware when private edifices and "defensive" capabilities rival the state's)
Which is why the Bill of Rights in the Constitution is so important, because there is no way for the citizenry to force the government to act or not act. The armed forces and law enforcement swear to uphold the Constitution for that reason.
The last bit is the key point. There is zero accountability: it's asking the fox to guard the hen house. Mumbling words soon forgotten that can't be said with a straight face.
In short: it's a real accountability gap by the people that preach ostensible "accountability" and "transparency."
USG needs a 4th branch made of veterans, privacy and industry leaders (people that are both sharp and straight shooters) that have total access to surprise audit, defund and compel changes to any secret program. The only goal is to change behavior to "I probably shouldn't do [horrible thing] because [people more powerful than my CO/president] will find out." Even if it's just a phony whitehouse press release by the Yes Men.
