Reasonable points, but...
Yes, the laws are too broad. Our national freakout over the damage done by 19 guys with knives was uncalled-for and it's well past time for those things (like the Patriot Act) to be scaled back.
But I come back to the fact that the guys who have access to this secret stuff do operate in a system with oversight. Likely not enough, but there is oversight within the system.
Nobody at the NSA who expects to have a job next year is going to be intentionally snooping on us. That's the bottom line. Times have changed since Hoover's day - for the better.
http://www.nsa.gov/a...s/oversight.shtml
I recognize that things don't always go according to plan, and recognize that there are people (like Snowden) who will break the rules (for whatever reason). No human system is perfect. But I don't accept that there's a huge conspiracy to make all of the things said on that web page into just pretty mouth noises for rubes like me. Civil servants generally take their jobs and their oaths seriously - they wouldn't work there if they didn't.
I understand that lots of people don't accept and don't believe that, but that's where I am. YMMV.
Cheers,
Scott.
