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Originally Posted by ---locke---";p="
It is true that the government can listen to me talking on the phone, but what do i have to hide? If the government can stop just one terrorist attack by this "evesdropping" then some lives have been saved, maybe even your own.
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Depends.
hat if the government begins to shove too many resources into eavesdropping and actually gets to the point where they are eavesdropping on all Americans? I know you don't care about what this means for privacy, but think about it in economic terms. Ever heard of opportunity cost?
Part of research and data collecting for security purposes is deciding which information sources are the most useful for getting good information and focusing on those sources. Wasting any amount of time on your calls to relatives across the sea is not only a waste of their time and your tax dollars- it's a waste of time and tax dollars that could have been used on a better intelligence source.
At the same time, intelligence gathering is similar to the world of finance in that one must diversify. The more we focus on phone calls, the less we can focus on intelligence gathered in the field or from documents or from anything else.
So if the government is to be allowed to eavesdrop, it's important to set guidelines as to what they should be using time on. It better be something (*)(*)(*)(*) suspicious.
Alternatively they can spend even more money on a larger intelligence bureaucracy so that they have enough analysts to cover all the info and we can always hope that somehow it all gets reconciled at the higher level with minimal confusion. I guess then at least I could find a full-time job.
When did we decide that this wiretapping was necessary? There is no real evidence to show that wiretapping would have prevented 9/11.
How many terrorist attacks on us were successful before 9/11? Not many. Care to guess how many were thwarted by our intelligence agencies? One failure and suddenly they're completely incompetent and we need to alter everything.
I can go with the changes that actually connect to why 9/11 wasn't thwarted: more ability to share information between agencies. Good idea.
But another problem was all the noise that kept intelligence agencies from focusing on the right information. Adding more to the noise is not going to help. It's going to make the situation worse.