why is government spying bad?

[trey4sports]

i get asked this quite a bit. i always say im opposed to government spying and im not good at articulating why its bad and i was hoping to get some good awnswers here.

in plain english, WHY should we not support the FISA bill or government spying in general, if youve done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide, right?

thanks guys

[heavenlyboy34]

It is a violation of the implicit social agreement established by the Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and the Articles of Confederation.

[Indy Vidual]

Why is government spying bad?

"Only the bad people need to worry about privacy."

"Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Which (above) statement is more accurate, in your opinion?

[TheEvilDetector]

i get asked this quite a bit. i always say im opposed to government spying and im not good at articulating why its bad and i was hoping to get some good awnswers here.

in plain english, WHY should we not support the FISA bill or government spying in general, if youve done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide, right?

thanks guys

Do you enjoy knowing someone is watching you or can if they feel like it?

What if information obtained by surveillance is used to implicate you in a criminal case you had nothing to do with?

What if information obtained by surveillance prejudices a fair trial by diminishing your character?

Consider the possibility of police breaking into your door and arresting you because your car was seen (via satellite or camera) driving past a murder scene at exactly the time the murder was committed (without you knowing anything about the murder).

Consider the possibility of losing a divorce settlement solely because your car was repeatedly seen (via satellite or camera) near gambling areas (you may have been driving there to pick up friends or maybe its near your work, who knows).

Consider your house being broken into and you arrested because you were seen talking to a drug dealer (without you knowing this person was drug dealer) via (satellite or camera)?

Consider IRS agents breaking into your house, because you joked about having hidden money from the authorities to a friend on a phonecall?

You can make up your own possibilities.

[RockEnds]

In plain English (aimed at the uber patriot), if we support government spying, every person who ever gave their life in defense of freedom died in vain.

Or if the person has really gotten on your last nerve,

So you're a Soviet sympathizer?

[Freedom 4 all]

If you don't mind a complete loss of privacy and an omnipotant government, then why are you so scared about a Islamist/Communist/Facist takeover? If we let our government become the same as that of our enemies, then we the people have already lost. Also point out that if one believes man's nature is so evil that it must not go unchecked, then we should not trust the MEN in government.

[TastyWheat]

Just because you aren't talking about blowing something up doesn't mean your words can't be used against you.

What if you boast to your neighbor about your brand new car then you get audited because the government doesn't think you're reporting all of your income? What if you criticize the government then you or your kids get turned down for federal school grants? What if all of your free speech gets you on the airlines' "watch list"? If the government doesn't need a warrant to tap your phone then what keeps them from acting on whatever they find?

Even if you're squeaky clean you must oppose any erosion of liberty. By the time it affects you personally it may be too late to change things.

[Bryan]

I see two fundamental issues:

1) Issues of contract. If you signed a contract with a communications company in which they agreed to keep your records private then allowing "government spying" would be a breech of that contract. If your contract says you have no privacy then don't expect any (and go some place else).

2) Cost. When someone starts to argue in favor of spying ask, "But who is going to pay for it?" The answer of course will be tax dollars, to which you can reply, "So you want to force people to pay for someone else to spy on them against their will? Exactly how is this a free country?" Case closed. :)

[Matt Collins]

Spying on people doesn't accomplish any preventative law enforcement.

It also has a chilling effect on people's actions, speech, and associations.

[DamianTV]

"Only the bad people need to worry about privacy."

"Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Which (above) statement is more accurate, in your opinion?

Actually they can both be dead on. If the people in government are the bad people then they want to get rid of your privacy to maintain the status quo, hence letting their power corrupt them completely.

Privacy becomes an issue to a normal good person when it stands in the way of corporate profits. Privacy becomes an issue for a bad person that doesnt want to get caught for what they've done. When you have a government of the people, the people will have privacy from the government. When you have a government that has become corrupted, they get rid of your privacy and claim their own. They now become the bad people that dont want to get caught, hence, everything gets classified, and they make it harder than hell for you to find the evidence of their wrongdoing.

...and one last question. To answer the question of "if you dont do anything wrong, why should you care if you are being spied on?" In response, just say "if I have done nothing wrong, why do they feel the need to spy on me?" Both answers create an endless loop between themselves. But what happens if you do find evidence of wrong doing and its so well buried that you cant even identify it as wrong doing to begin with?

[pacelli]

i always say im opposed to government spying and im not good at articulating why its bad and i was hoping to get some good awnswers here.


Why would you express an opposition to something if you don't know why you are opposed to it? Do you feel comfortable knowing that your phone calls are not private?

[pacelli]

if youve done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide, right?



If I've done nothing wrong, then why do you need to spy on me?

[Malakai]

Who watches the watchers?

True for any secretive government. In our case today we watch the watchers with shock and awe at how amazingly bad people can be at their jobs.

Ask them if they really want those TSA guys that harass you at the airport and take your toothpaste having access to all kind of secret surveillance.

[bubbleboy]

Im afraid UN Energy Council heard you flush your toilet three times in one day. Because of this blantant waste of water and energy, you are now under serveilence. It has been discovered that your total average goods are worth more than you pay taxes for.
We have decided to audit your children because of your history of waste. In our findings, your dauhter was caught with 4 flourecent light fixtures in her study. We are now auditing her dailey movement to see if her income she claims matches the hours she spends at work.
Unfortunately your brother was observed speaking out against our homeland and its leader, and he has been arrested.
We are now arresting you minister for hate crimes. Homosexuality is not a sin in everyone's eyes and this will not be tolerated.

Oh yea, you ex wife now works for the city serveilence and has been watching you for a year and is ready with some bad evidence about you breaking over 50 traffic laws and speeding alot.

I could go on forever. :eek:

[noxagol]

If you owned a business, would you allow your employees to take money from you and use it to conduct constant survallence on you?

The government works for us, not the other way around.

[kojirodensetsu]

Have you ever seen The Dark Knight? In the movie batman set up this system so he could essentially spy on the whole city to find the joker. I think a lot of people expect the government to act like batman. They think if the government can spy that they'll catch the criminals like the joker. However the difference between batman and the government is batman is not corrupt, but big government is. Batman goes after a killer, but the government would go after whoever it wants. And the concept of a corrupt entity watching over me is what scares me.

[RCA]

It's not one of their enumerated powers.

[Kade]

Because the government can decide what "being bad" means.

When they decide that speaking out against the government is "being bad", You'll be put on a Terrorist watch list. Have fun.

[ronpaulhawaii]

Click the image for a look at the future if we allow spying


http://i209.photobucket.com/albums/bb19/mkauai/w4f/th_PizzaPalace.jpg (http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb19/mkauai/w4f/?action=view&current=PizzaPalace.flv)

[drew1503]

This is why:

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=5987804&page=1

Exclusive: Inside Account of U.S. Eavesdropping on Americans

U.S. Officers' "Phone Sex" Intercepted; Senate Demanding Answers

By BRIAN ROSS, VIC WALTER, and ANNA SCHECTER

Oct. 9, 2008—

Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), called the allegations "extremely disturbing" and said the committee has begun its own examination.

"We have requested all relevant information from the Bush Administration," Rockefeller said Thursday. "The Committee will take whatever action is necessary."

"These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones," said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA's Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.

Kinne described the contents of the calls as "personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism."

She said US military officers, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted and "collected on" as they called their offices or homes in the United States.
Watch "World News Tonight with Charles Gibson" and "Nightline" for more of Brian Ross' exclusive report.

Another intercept operator, former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk, 39, said he and his fellow intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans picked up using phones in Baghdad's Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007.

"Calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses, sometimes their girlfriends, sometimes one phone call following another," said Faulk.

The accounts of the two former intercept operators, who have never met and did not know of the other's allegations, provide the first inside look at the day to day operations of the huge and controversial US terrorist surveillance program.

"There is a constant check to make sure that our civil liberties of our citizens are treated with respect," said President Bush at a news conference this past February.

But the accounts of the two whistleblowers, which could not be independently corroborated, raise serious questions about how much respect is accorded those Americans whose conversations are intercepted in the name of fighting terrorism.


US Soldier's 'Phone Sex' Intercepted, Shared
Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer.

"Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News.

Faulk said he joined in to listen, and talk about it during breaks in Back Hall's "smoke pit," but ended up feeling badly about his actions.

"I feel that it was something that the people should not have done. Including me," he said.

In testimony before Congress, then-NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden, now director of the CIA, said private conversations of Americans are not intercepted.

"It's not for the heck of it. We are narrowly focused and drilled on protecting the nation against al Qaeda and those organizations who are affiliated with it," Gen. Hayden testified.

He was asked by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), "Are you just doing this because you just want to pry into people's lives?"

"No, sir," General Hayden replied.

Asked for comment about the ABC News report and accounts of intimate and private phone calls of military officers being passed around, a US intelligence official said "all employees of the US government" should expect that their telephone conversations could be monitored as part of an effort to safeguard security and "information assurance."

"They certainly didn't consent to having interceptions of their telephone sex conversations being passed around like some type of fraternity game," said Jonathon Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University who has testified before Congress on the country's warrantless surveillance program.

"This story is to surveillance law what Abu Ghraib was to prison law," Turley said.


Listening to Aid Workers
NSA awarded Adrienne Kinne a NSA Joint Service Achievement Medal in 2003 at the same time she says she was listening to hundreds of private conversations between Americans, including many from the International Red Cross and Doctors without Borders.

"We knew they were working for these aid organizations," Kinne told ABC News. "They were identified in our systems as 'belongs to the International Red Cross' and all these other organizations. And yet, instead of blocking these phone numbers we continued to collect on them," she told ABC News.

A spokesman for Doctors Without Borders, Michael Goldfarb, said: "The abuse of humanitarian action through intelligence gathering for military or political objectives, threatens the ability to assist populations and undermines the safety of humanitarian aid workers."

Both Kinne and Faulk said their military commanders rebuffed questions about listening in to the private conversations of Americans talking to Americans.

"It was just always, that , you know, your job is not to question. Your job is to collect and pass on the information," Kinne said.

Some times, Kinne and Faulk said, the intercepts helped identify possible terror planning in Iraq and saved American lives.

"IED's were disarmed before they exploded, that people who were intending to harm US forces were captured ahead of time," Faulk said.

NSA job evaluation forms show he regularly received high marks for job performance. Faulk left his job as a newspaper reporter in Pittsburgh to join the Navy after 9/11.

Kinne says the success stories underscored for her the waste of time spent listening to innocent Americans, instead of looking for the terrorist needle in the haystack.

"By casting the net so wide and continuing to collect on Americans and aid organizations, it's almost like they're making the haystack bigger and it's harder to find that piece of information that might actually be useful to somebody," she said. "You're actually hurting our ability to effectively protect our national security."


The NSA: "The Shadow Factory"
Both former intercept operators came forward at first to speak with investigative journalist Jim Bamford for a book on the NSA, "The Shadow Factory," to be published next week.

"It's extremely rare," said Bamford, who has written two previous books on the NSA, including the landmark "Puzzle Palace" which first revealed the existence of the super secret spy agency.

"Both of them felt that what they were doing was illegal and improper, and immoral, and it shouldn't be done, and that's what forces whistleblowers."

A spokesman for General Hayden, Mark Mansfield, said: "At NSA, the law was followed assiduously. The notion that General Hayden sanctioned or tolerated illegalities of any sort is ridiculous on its face."
The director of the NSA, Lt. General Keith B. Alexander, declined to directly answer any of the allegations made by the whistleblowers.

In a written statement, Gen. Alexander said: "We have been entrusted to protect and defend the nation with integrity, accountability, and respect for the law. As Americans, we take this obligation seriously. Our employees work tirelessly for the good of the nation, and serve this country proudly."

Click Here for the Investigative Homepage. (http://www.abcnews.go.com/blotter)

Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

[Matt Collins]

I just saw a news report that DHS has given the city of Orlando a bunch of money to put up cameras throughout the city.