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People just toss comments like this around as though they were facts when in fact it’s completely paranoid made up q-anon level nonsense.

These laws work a very specific way and have very specific controls in place to prevent shit like you describe from happening which you could go and read up on if you wanted to but it’s much easier to fear monger amongst one another because it plays to your ego that somebody who is important enough to be under surveillance by an intelligence agency.




You could easily look at things like the Snowden leaks to see how well such controls end up working out. My favorite was NSA agents collecting and sharing sexual content. [1] The reason that's my favorite is not because it's the most extreme example of abuse - it's not, not by a longshot. The reason is that it really demonstrates that 'government' isn't some abstract or holistic entity. It's just a group of people, like you and I -- with the exact same vices, egos, weaknesses, and so on.

And of course this applies not only to the NSA spooks, but all the way up. You shouldn't be any more comfortable letting 'the government' spy on you, than you would be letting me spy on you. If you want another example along the same lines, spooks spying on their love interests is so common that there's a slang term for it - LOVEINT [2]. Basically, don't grant people power over other people unless it's really just completely and absolutely necessary, because it will be abused. So the benefit needs to substantially outweigh the inevitable abuses. And in this case, that obviously doesn't hold.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/21/us/politics/edward-snowde...

[2] - https://slate.com/technology/2013/09/loveint-how-nsa-spies-s...



https://apnews.com/article/fisa-foreign-surveillance-fbi-3f7...

One does not have to be “important enough” if they are conducting mass surveillance and storing it in a database indefinitely.


How things work in your mind and how they work in the real world are very very different things in this instance.


What are the massive NSA datacenters for in the very very real world?


It's a secret court making secret law. This is, by definition, both unaccountable and impossible to conclude is not being used to cover up massive abuse, because whatever is happening is being concealed from the voters.


> completely paranoid made up q-anon level nonsense.

For what is worth, I'm quite left leaning and fully agree with the parent poster. Information is power, no matter which party or in which country.




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