I had to do some major plumbing repair recently. I watched a lot of plumbing videos on Youtube to make sure I was doing everything correctly, because I had never done any plumbing work before and was worried I might screw something up. If I wanted to construct an IED, I'd probably watch a lot of videos to make sure I was doing everything correctly, because I've never constructed a remotely detonated explosive device capable of destroying a large vehicle and I'd worry that I might screw something up.
That's quite the strawman argument you've shot back. It goes along nicely with the shifting goalposts - if you recall, the original argument I was replying to simply stated that these programs had nothing to do with terrorism.
My point in my previous comment was that most of the people watching videos on bomb-making are probably interested in building bombs. If you're trying to find people who want to blow stuff up, that's probably not a bad place to start looking. Nowhere in there did I say the government should be blowing up everyone who looks at the wrong Youtube video.
Yes, it's a shame that the US constitution doesn't prevent a Canadian intelligence agency from spying on kidnappers in Germany and Algeria who are uploading videos of their hostages, along with Kenyans downloading bomb-making videos from companies in Hong Kong (Megaupload), Switzerland (Rapidshare) and wherever sendspace.com is located (their terms of use just says 'not in the US').
> How would you know what the program's being used to look for?
Because I read the article and the accompanying Powerpoint slide deck, and those were the only concrete examples in it. You can't really make many hard conclusions beyond what was shown, and the examples that they did show weren't very infuriating...
