For Your Safety: Dragnet Spying Tactics

'It's not Spying, it's data collection' {For Your Safety} -American Senators

is like saying

'It's not PeepingTom, It's Bathroom Maintenance' {For Your Safety}

-R. William Holzkopf Jr.

Director of the ACLU’s Privacy and Technology department Ben Wizener appeared on CNN to say “this is a good day for Edward Snowden.”
Wizener believes that yesterdays court ruling from a federal judge appointed by George W. Bush which challenged the NSA’s blanket data collection program is “what happens when important legal issues are decided in open courts, where both sides get to make legal arguments. Rather than in secret courts where the government alone gets to present arguments to a court. This is, I think, a good day for Edward Snowden. This is what he had in mind. He saw programs. He doubted their legality. He saw that the oversight mechanisms had failed. That secret courts had become a rubber stamp. That congressional committees had been enabling rather than, than actually exercising oversight. And so he brought the information to the public through journalists and he brought it to the lawyers who brought this case.” 

http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/good-day-edward-snowden/#axzz2nl6EJlV2

“American Senators tell us that Brazil should not worry, because this is not ‘surveillance,’ it’s ‘data collection.’ They say it is done to keep you safe. They’re wrong. There is a huge difference between legal programs, legitimate spying, legitimate law enforcement — where individuals are targeted based on a reasonable, individualized suspicion — and these programs of dragnet mass surveillance that put entire populations under an all-seeing eye and save copies forever. These programs were never about terrorism: they’re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power.”