About NSA Surveillance

Back in the old George W Bush days, the Democrats perhaps screamed loudest about what they were calling "Warrantless Wiretaps".  The Democrats, notably including Barack Obama, expressed outrage that American citizens' telephone calls might be tracked by the NSA.  The Bush government explained that they only tracked them if there was an established pattern of calls to and from known foreign terrorsts.

So the law was changed to require a judge in a court called FISA to rule on permission for the government to collect data on suspected terrorist communications.

With all the conflicting news reporting happening today on the same topic, I can't quite tell what the Obama administration is doing or how it compares with what the Bush administration did.  Snowden says they're storing all of our communications and data mining them to look for potential terror plots.  Others in the government are saying that Snowden is a liar - that it's only metadata that they mine to look for certain patterns.

The information leaked by Snowden has created an unlikely alliance between the Libertarian wing of the Republican Party and the Far-Left wing of the Democrat Party.  They're both appalled at the idea that the government is collecting and storing our communications indefinitely.

I've sort of waited awhile before arriving at any specific conclusions or positions on the subject, and honestly I'm not sure I know enough even now to draw any conclusions.  But based on what seems to be the logical likely truth of the matter, I tend to think the Obama administration has certainly violated our constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

Those who are telling us things like -

If you're doing nothing wrong, you've got nothing to worry about, and
Nobody's listening in on your telephone calls or reading your emails

are making me nervous simply by expressing those things. 

Because the first statement seems to admit that they are listening in and reading our private communications, so the second sounds an awful lot like a lie.

Here's where I see the biggest problem with what they seem to be doing, if my interpretation is correct:

Say I decide to run for congress as a Republican.  Suppose I'm projected as the likely winner against my Democratic Party opponent.  The White House calls up one of their Democratic Party supporters inside the NSA and says, "Get on that computer and look for anything in his phone records or emails or text messages that we can use against this guy running for congress in Indiana against our guy".  The planted operative at the NSA does just that, feeds the information back and my own emails or private conversations are parsed and taken out of context to make me look either corrupt or an idiot, then those heavily edited quotes are sent to their candidate to use in his campaign.

Worse yet, they start collecting a list of names of people who are self-identified conservatives, Christians, Tea Party members, NRA members, or all of the other groups that have been labeled the enemies of Obama.  One day that list might be used to round us all up and imprison or execute us, just as the other major communist dictators did in places like Russia, China, Cuba, Mexico, and various other countries around the globe. 

Of course, if it goes so far as to persecute those critical of the government, our Republic would have been lost well before that happened.  I'm not all that certain the Republic hasn't already been destroyed.

So bottom line, I say no.  The NSA does not have the authority to grab and store all the communcation records of Americans.  If they have a suspect, they should use proper procedures to get whatever warrants they need from the judiciary to do their investigation.  And anybody from either political party ever caught using a citizen's beliefs against him (a la the IRS scandal) must be put in prison for 20 years minimum.  Even if it's the President himself who gets caught.