At the direction of Bush's awful Patriot Act, and joyfully continued by the Obama administration, the NSA has been collecting, or "data mining", phone, text, and e-mail information on potentially all Americans. We were told by Bush that only international calls to suspected terrorist countries would be mined for terrorist activity, but clearly domestic communications are subject to NSA surveillance too.
In a general sense I oppose the government snooping into my business without a warrant. But I recognize the specific need to foil domestic terrorism activities. It's a fine line for a libertarian to draw between privacy and security.
That said, what's to stop a marketing company from bundling millions in campaign donations and then asking for, and receiving, access to all this communications for the purposes of directed advertising? Despite the Obama administration swearing that no lobbyists would have privileged access, lobbyists have daily privileged access. It is axiomatic that money buys you political access to every administration.
What happens when non-homeland security law enforcement gets a hold of our communication patterns and holds them against us in legal matters? What about when a white house official sells our phone calls about health matters to the behemoth universal health care bureaucracy?
I've said it before and I'll say it again.....liberty and privacy are more important than security and Orwellian scrutiny by the government.
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