Maybe I recognize that there's a lot of gray area between North Korean police state and lawless maximum freedom anarchy, that the government needs to constantly balance privacy and security, and finally that the government knowing you called your friend is not really a big deal and doesn't really infringe on anyone's liberty/privacy.
But no, the correct answer must be that I just love sucking Obama's cock.
fair enough. but there's an awful lot of 'what ifs' here.like say, what if your friends happen to all be known homosexuals? or you know people with a criminal record? what if you made calls to something like alcoholics anonymous? or a suicide hotline? or phone sex hotline for that matter? how do you know the above won't be used as blackmail or to otherwise discredit you if you step out of line? and what about protecting confidentiality for press sources?
now obviously i'm pretty far from a libertarian. but it doesn't exactly take a genius to see how this sort of program could be massively abused. not to mention the government's position is basically a classic 'heads i win, tails you lose type' kind of fallacious argument. they don't have to actually prove they've foiled any terror plots, they can just say they have but that's classified. but if there is a successful terror attack then obviously they need more power to stop future ones from occurring.
that said on some level i feel the typical civil libertarian position on this is somewhat naive. i keep asking myself all kinds of questions on this honestly. like, what exactly is a warrant other than the government asking itself permission to invade people's privacy after all? do people really expect the government to stop doing this even if the courts do say spying is unconstitutional? and if it wasn't the government doing this, what about your boss or companies data mining your information? would that be okay (a lot of libertarians would say yes...)? is this sort of thing even preventible given that video surveillance technology and spyware and all of that keeps getting more advanced every year? it just feels like anyone that cares about these things is in a losing position by default.
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