"A response by Redditor 161719 to the 7 June 2013 post by Redditor legalbeagle05 titled 'I believe the government should be allowed to view my e-mails, tap my phone calls, and view my web history for national security concerns. CMV'": https://web.archive.org/web/20130611184727/www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1fv4r6/i_believe_the_government_should_be_allowed_to/caeb3pl
Source: #5 at http://www.reddit.com/r/worldpolitics/comments/23bchn/the_original_nsa_whistleblower_where_i_see_it/cgvlnim?context=3
"The History Behind The 4th Amendment" by Jason W. Swindle, Sr., published on 21 March 2013: http://www.swindlelaw.com/the-history-behind-the-4th-amendment/
Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20130407004407/www.swindlelaw.com/the-history-behind-the-4th-amendment/
"Fascism Anyone?" by Laurence W. Britt, published in the Spring 2003 (Volume 23, Number 2) issue of Free Inquiry: https://web.archive.org/web/20030604055112/secularhumanism.org/library/fi/britt_23_2.htm
Source: #1 at http://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/2p2ic4/congress_quietly_bolsters_nsa_spying_in/cmszf5f?context=3
"Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin's 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile spread across his face.
'You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,' he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country's secret police, the Stasi. . . .
. . . East Germany's Stasi has long been considered the standard of police state surveillance during the Cold War years, a monitoring regime so vile and so intrusive that agents even noted when their subjects were overheard engaging in sexual intercourse. Against that backdrop, Germans have greeted with disappointment, verging on anger, the news that somewhere in a U.S. government databank are the records of where millions of people were when they made phone calls or what video content they streamed on their computers in the privacy of their homes.
Even Schmidt, 73, who headed one of the more infamous departments in the infamous Stasi, called himself appalled. The dark side to gathering such a broad, seemingly untargeted, amount of information is obvious, he said.
'It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won't be used,' he said. 'This is the nature of secret government organizations. The only way to protect the people's privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place.' . . ."
Source: "Memories of Stasi color Germans' view of U.S. surveillance programs" by Matthew Schofield, published on 26 June 2013 at http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/26/195045/memories-of-stasi-color-germans.html
(a) "What sort of Despotism Democratic Nations have to Fear" by Alexis de Tocqueville: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/ch4_06.htm
Source: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/toc_indx.html
(b) Watch "DESPOTISM" by Encyclopaedia Britannica Films Inc.: https://archive.org/details/Despotis1946 (Internet Archive) or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLlLEtWEY4Y (YouTube)