Government dos and don’ts
by digby
So, somebody commented in an email the other day that anti-Vaxxers are the same people who think the NSA shouldn’t be collecting metadata. This is evidently because anyone who mistrusts government police power is exactly like someone who believes everything they read on the internet. The founders were a bunch of paranoid loons who wrote the Bill of Rights because they foolishly assumed that human beings abuse their power without some legal restraint. (Where would they get such ideas?)
Most people don’t consider public health to be an abuse of government power. In fact, they think that’s exactly the kind of government task for which we pay our taxes. On the other hand, a lot of people think that the government should prove to a judge that it has probable cause to suspect a person of committing a crime before it collects all of his communications. Storing everybody’s communications “just in case” is the equivalent of asking the post office to make a copy of every letter and keep it on file just in case the government might want to read someone’s mail some day. Just the fact that the government did this in secret is enough to make reasonable people question its motives.
And to those who keep saying there’s been no case in which the government failed to properly follow the rules:
Fact: NSA has many times abused their authority & broken rules meant to protect privacy http://t.co/J6orWWrn3p #ODNI pic.twitter.com/YX3ALJAzCu
— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) February 4, 2015