Despite the fact that your votes against extending the Protect America Act suggest that you are in favor of the proposed telecom immunity that failed to come to a vote this week, I want to thank you for your role in rejecting said immunity.
While there is no doubt that passing an Ex-Post Facto law to provide telecom companies with safe harbor for actions regarding the transfer of private citizen information to the federal government without a warrant would increase the volume of data available for intelligence gathering, such myopic thinking ignores a vast majority of the effects this action would have on this nation and its government.
While we currently spend a hundred billion dollars per year in the name of fighting terrorism and protecting the roughly 250 US citizens per year that it kills, We spend a mere five billion on cancer research and helping the 500,000 per year that die from it. That's a $400,000,000 per death to only $10,000 per death.
What is the focus of our current War on Terror? Given the numbers above, it certainly isn't to prevent US deaths; such a goal would require the immediate re-distribution of WoT funds to medical research. What the billions of dollars appear to be doing is to help reduce the chance of death by violent act perpetrated by someone with an extreme ideology. To protect us from a rare method of death at the hands of another human being.
While noble, how much money is that worth?
How much freedom is the tiny fraction of useful information caught up in a telecom dragnet worth for the same noble but marginal goal?
What happened to the concept of a small government? Of Personal Freedom and Privacy as the root of a free democracy?
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1 comment:
A point very well made :)
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