Prism

This is just feeding my paranoia. But like Sardines said, this has been going on for a while. I would expect conservative media to go after the whole IRS thing and the so-called Benghazi "incident". I don't know the validity of the things I just listed, though.

It depends how jaded you are about the entire process. It's only logical that the NSA scaled up from telephones to internet communication and the court being compliant with the NSA is also not a big surprise. I mean why would they block an undergoing investigation of a potential crime target? The only 'bad thing' is that touting virtues like national security and protection from terrorism are fundamentally b.s.-itty value judgments since there is often no rational gauge to mete out when the fear of terrorism and invasion of national security will ever end. The lack of developing a public strategy with details on how Prism is going to operate is the main culprit behind the government's ability to consistently get away with it. What's even more important than the invasion of privacy that people reflexively feel when their own data mining on their harddrive gets data mined, is that when you don't have clear and concise guidelines for utilizing these resources you end up with an over abundance of information that can't be usefully processed. Likely the government is using automated software to expedite the immense amount of information they pull, but really the effectiveness is questionable unless there is an effective team in place to piece together the greater picture from all these data fragments that you can bet won't be gathered on one site like jihadenthusiast.com.

The biggest irony to this debate is that this is not actually a debate about information as it is about the pretense of having information. We presume that the government has a greater collective source of information due to these NSA data-pulling operatins that go on in the shadows. Whether or not that data is actually relevant to application on a threat to America is questionable, but the American people will defer to the government as they have authority and cite secret sources point out to other countries possessing weapons of mass destruction. It is true that questions were posed at the government during the conjecture that Saddam possessed WMDs, however this did little to abate the war. Documents leaked two months ago show a strategy report from Donald Rumself pondering whether it would be better to lead the war into Iraq on linking either the anthrax scandal or WMDs to Saddam, insinuating that neither conjecture was wholly sincere. Data won't nearly be effective as the insinuated existence of it when push comes to shove and realizing this materializes the inconsequences of the threat posed by actual data mining to civil liberties, when a civilian doesn't have to pose an actual threat or possess intimidating data in order to be seen as a threat to national security. I'm not defecting to the tin foil hats who are afraid of drone strikes flying from the skies on innocent civilians, but I don't believe that data needs to be used to incriminate someone on the stipulation of the government.

I don't really care about Benghazi and the IRS, but I think that how it was handled was very poor and indicative of an on going trend in pleading ignorance. Obama stating that it was his first time learning about some of the IRS situation is classic of the Senate Hearing with respect to the London Whale and also the lying by the IRS official who ultimately ended up pleading the fifth. The IRS would be justified in showing discretion on conservative groups like Crossroads GPS which has nothing to do with mapping or road networking like you would think the name implies, but is a donation front set up by Karl Rove to support Republicans. I mean really, which party did you think it would support? The name Karl Rove might as well be synonymous with Republican party. As for changing the talking points on Benghazi that's something we will never know probably until a decade or two from now. Maybe even more if that's going to be the pretense for another war.