Had to look this up:

> The NYPD secretly spied on Muslim organizations, infiltrated Muslim student group and videotaped mosque-goers in New Jersey for years, it was revealed in 2012. The NYPD said its actions were lawful and necessary to keep the city safe.

http://gothamist.com/2013/05/20/ap_obtains_texts_from_the_ny...

http://gothamist.com/2013/04/30/bloomberg_dont_mess_with_nyp...

Look's like they should focus on their own problems.

To be fair, in a way they were focussing on their own problems. Like...the whole Twin Towers thing.

The NYPD declined the need an Inspector General or a federal monitor after it was discovered. They are conducting a secret surveillance based on a groups religious affiliation without public scrutiny and want to defend the power to continue doing so.

And let's not forget the "stop-and-frisk" program[1], in which the NYPD detains hundreds of thousands of people every year on the streets and searches them without probable cause. Only one in eight of these stops result in an accusation of a crime (and most of those are probably just pot possession). In my opinion, that's quite a bit more unpleasant for law-abiding people to endure than having their phone records sifted through by the NSA.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_stop-and-frisk_p...

Pot, kettle, black.

"I think the American public can accept the fact if you tell them that every time you pick up the phone it’s going to be recorded and it goes to the government."

I can't believe this guy. At least he thinks it should be public, I suppose.

Because he wants to do it, too. In a just world this guy would be out of a job.

“I think the American public can accept the fact if you tell them that every time you pick up the phone it’s going to be recorded and it goes to the government,” Kelly said. “I think the public can understand that. I see no reason why that program was placed in the secret category.”

The whole media ruckus over Snowden is simply because people don't like secrets being kept from them. They're actually completely cool with the whole total surveillance thing, though.

That's actually part of the media ruckus. There's a lot wrong going on with these programs, and people have different objections. Some object to the surveillance itself, some object that it was kept secret but approve of the surveillance, and some object to the way the executive branch is doing this without meaningful input from the other branches of government. And of course, some simply object because of the executive who is doing it.

For those who object to the surveillance: it's really important to engage others about the privacy/surveillance debate right now. As those who only oppose the secrecy or the process aspects of what's going on become satisfied, interest will dissipate and it'll become much harder to engage people on the surveillance issue itself. It's a really interesting opportunity to actually engage people about privacy and surveillance without many people instantly deferring to the status quo.

How about we just start at whether it's legal and Constitutional? Everything else follows from that.

s/come clean about/let us use their system for/

“He tried to give the impression, it seems to me, that these system administrators had carte blanche to do what they wanted to do,” he said. “I think it’s a problem if that’s in fact what’s happening.”

Is it, in fact, possible to administer a system without having full access to that system?

Well...

Yes and no.

For instance, you can give a team full access... and at the same time have access control only grant that full access when two different people enter their credentials.

Also, audits should be more than cursory... and should be performed by a DIFFERENT organization.

They can operate in a more secure fashion than, I suspect, they currently operate.

But when you consider the full matter..

You begin to see that the message, on a national level, is being managed in such a manner that "solutions" presuppose the EXISTENCE of these databases. If it were up to me, I would try to keep the conversation squarely centered around the deconstruction of this surveillance infrastructure. But we need to find a Senator who can credibly do that in the absence of Feingold... and this is a problem.

Just goes to show that regardless of all the claims of oversight, it all comes down to people. You combine that with the fact that power corrupts and it's obvious what a danger the NSA is to America.