re: #133 Political Atheist

What is the lesson from history time and again? Sooner or later the existing system gets abused. Turns political, goes too far etc etc. The wrong people get in. Something goes awry. We can accept that incident within certain limits (like warrants, PC etc.) or we can let those limits fail to stop something worse. Throw in private contractors on a lot of this super high technology and system infrastructure and the potential gets pretty hairy.

The thing is, none of this is very significant, to me. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the 4th amendment violation that is the stop-and-frisk law in NYC, for example, that affects 500,000 actual people every year, the vast majority of them black and Hispanic. The FISA court thing isn’t happening in a vacuum, it’s because of a lot of case law that’s weakened the 4th.

There are more serious and persistent violations of civil rights going on all over the place; this program is a potential problem, and it’s a natural outgrowth of our general 4th amendment stupidity. It’s not going to go away if we just pass better law on it, we need more Sotomayors on the SC.