and false equivalence. Sorting mail is not the same thing as hoovering up all electronic communication, storing and decrypting it, and indexing it against the "legal" metadata should they ever need to get a rubber stamp approval to use everything.
We are already an extreme endemic surveillance society, one of the top 3 in the world. This is not indicative of a "free" society. But it's done only for our protection! Our SECURITY! We're only giving up a LITTLE bit of our liberties, because after all, this IS the land of the free and the home of the brave. But do keep up with the apologist humor, it's funnier when we see our country being chipped away a little bit at a time. Otherwise there could be a revolution or something and that would be icky.
In thirty years this country will probably not be recognizable to someone from the sixties. With any luck I'll be to dead to care.