I appreciate your response.
The beytrayel is helping to catalogue their own citizens as if they are bugs, not realizing that's an incredibly dangerous and irresponsible act, and any participant in that machine is essentially helping any future or current Hitler-esque people to persecute whoever it is they want to.
You lost any point you may have had at "Hitler-esque". It's hardly a betrayal. There's a line between knowing something and acting on it. Show me where the NSA has acted on it against US citizens.
Whatever the current administration is doing, however "righteous" it is, if ANYBODY with power and the will gets their hand on all the data, they can persecute pretty much anybody for whatever reason.
That's hardly unique to the NSA, though. Such an apparatus exists in almost all modern societies. That the NSA has been exposed as having pursued it is no more damning a condemnation than your comparisons to Hitler's Germany.
Hitler's Germany was the outgrowth of the same internal security infrastructures found in all late 1800 European countries. It was not unique. The Soviet Union killed 60 million people. Do you think that the US is suddenly going to tip into that territory as well? Or do you think that it's the mere presence of the NSA that facilitates it?
Or how about the red scares in our own country, the USA?
I'm not American. I'm South African but I probably understand the very real threat of communism better than most.
McCarthy would have LOVEEEEDDD to have the great big NSA database during that time.
Sure. That McCarthy was right, though, seems to have eluded you.
Would have made it a whole lot easier to target people who had ideas that he didn't like.
You mean enemies of the State? Yes, it definitely would.
It's not healthy, beneficial, or productive, to work to create this giant citizen database of all their life stories wrapped up into supercomputers.
As opposed to all the other database of countless terabytes of data collected on US and other global citizens daily by a myriad of governmental and private enterprises? The same databases often leveraged by organisations such as the NSA to collective and index information on people? Information that citizens give up freely. Is your position merely that the NSA cannot be trusted by virtue of being the NSA? Because lots of organisations collect data. Are you really just against collecting data of any kind by anyone? Who is to say that terabytes, again, of data haven't been collected from freely available sources for use against the US by other nations or groups?
Like I said, I'm not American. But, I trust the NSA and the US government far more to at least want to do what's right than any other nation. The American's still have that going for them. Pity that you cannot see that.