Are We Gaining Security?

"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both."  Ben Franklin
                        
In light of all the intrusions into our privacy over the years, Franklin was nothing less than prophetic. The level of surveillance in this country has become increasingly disturbing with each passing day of new revelations.

We learned from The Guardian that the NSA has been collecting the phone records of millions of Americans regardless of any wrongdoing. James Bamford, author of several books on the NSA, commented “Here we are, under the Obama administration, doing it sort of like the Bush administration on steroids,” he said in an interview with the Associated Press. “This order here is about as broad as it can possibly get, when it comes to focusing on personal communications. There’s no warrant, there’s no suspicion, there’s no probable cause … it sounds like something from East Germany.”  William Binney, who's worked at the NSA for 40 years, estimates that the agency collects 3 billion calls per day. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/06/nsa-whistleblowers-startling-claims-records-on-3-billion-calls-collected-per-day-and-its-not-just-verizon/

In defense of the government collecting phone records from Americans, the Obama administration says, such information is “a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats.”  However, this contradicts Obama's announcement that the war on terror is over.  http://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2013/05/29/obama-declares-war-on-terror-over-n1607729

And we learned from The Washington Post that the NSA and the FBI are tapping into 9 leading internet companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, YouTube, Apple, Skype, AOL, and PalTalk. This program, named PRISM, extracts audio and video chats, photographs, emails, documents and connection logs, which allow analysts to track networks of associates.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html

All this in the name of security, and yet, with all the warnings and evidence the government had to halt it, the terrorists in Boston were still able to accomplish their mission. 

"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both."