You boil a frog slowly. If such thing as torture, surveillance, indefinite imprisonment without trial, secretive kill list, secretive removal of right (no fly list) etc, become normalized and accepted, then a huge part of what forms a free society is already gone.
Every single one of your examples as occurred within the U.S. in the past though, and often all at the same time. This frog has often jumped out of the pot.
This is not to say that is any excuse for surveillance for the sake of surveillance. But things like Prism do have a use.
More importantly Big Data is already here and I fear it will be impossible to fully prevent the government from getting their hands into, whether it's stuff like capturing Internet traffic directly or simply ad hoc arrangements with telecom and cloud companies.
In short, we risk allowing incredible capabilities to fall into the hands of a cyber-paramilitary of dubious loyalty to the people.
What we have done with nearly every other dangerous tool is to own it, allow it to exist but specify precisely the conditions under which we will allow it to exist. We formed professional communities around these tools, wrapped them in layers and layers and layers of accountability, law, policy, and yes, transparency.
Of course none of us want the government to spy on us. But I also don't want to pay taxes, or have the government search my home, but both are possible (some with more requirements than others).
Instead most of the discussion dismisses the question out-of-hand: "I don't ever want the government to know anything about me so there's no possible way to demonstrate a situation that would be worth it".
I'm not saying surveillance is worth it here. I'm just trying to figure out why no one seems to even consider the questions.
1. What valid law enforcement or national security purpose can be served by program $X?
2. Can it be uniquely served only by program $X?
3. If it can be served by other programs, can it be done so in a cost-effective way, relative to the risk/reward for program $X?
4. Assuming there are benefit, what risks does the program pose?
5. Can those risks be ameliorated by law, policy, and/or technical means? (E.g. with the crypto wizards at NSA it should be easily possible to implement a collection system which is kept encrypted and requires 2 or 3 parties to agree to decrypt for a given analysis).
You're saying the program is too risky, which kind of pre-supposes that there's a valid use to the program at all. Has anyone here seriously considered, however, whether it's actually socially, organizationally, and technically feasible to implement a program such as this assuming it has a valid use?
