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" If not the NSA, someone else will be collecting it." Correct, that company in the private sector is called Palantir.

“What we learned from the 2016 election is that all the bad things we were told NSA was doing, Facebook was actually the one doing them.”

There are three kinds of groups collecting data on individuals today:

- Democratic governments

- Autocratic governments

- Surveillance-capitalism private firms

Of those three groups, only democratic countries have rules and laws in place to protect individuals. NSA has strict rules about data collection on US citizens; autocratic countries and Facebook do not. NSA has caught a few employees looking at data they should not have; those employees were disciplined.

I’d much rather have agencies of a democratic government doing this than anyone else. I’m a US citizen, but I trust the U.K., Canada, etc to do this right.

I don't necessarily trust governments to do the right thing right off the bat, but I do trust judges' ability to defang government overreach more than private corporation overreach.

Unfortunately this judicial review only seems to occur way, way after the fact

"parallel reconstruction" is illegal but still alive and well. The Fed intelligence doesn't care about the law too much.

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