The intentions behind it are sound
I'm not even sure about that. The intentions that they
state might seem reasonable, but are not the same as their actual intentions. They say they are doing it for our own good. What good? What is it doing us?
We pay taxes so that the NSA can spy on foreign companies to steal IP and hand it over to our own companies in exchange for them getting cheaper parts. That does not help the US citizen, and it certainly doesn't help foreign citizens. We lose so that they can grow in power.
They spy on, discredit, and blackmail, politicians (Politicians they consider "radicals." You know, like the ones that strongly believe in the constitution. Ron Paul was considered a "radical"). They manipulate the media (several journalists from well-known sources have refused to run anti-NSA stories out of fear of legal trouble). They manipulate facts. They blatantly lie to us, the people, and congress. They spread propaganda far and wide. Since when has an uninformed population been able to make informed decisions to lead their country in the right direction? You can't vote the right way if you aren't allowed to know what's going on.
Nearly everything they are doing has nothing to do with terrorists, yet they make the claim that they are protecting us from them. That's funny, because didn't they have to recently admit in court, with a 68-page document, that they have stopped 0 terrorist attacks? Gee, I wonder why that is.
Recently, the FBI has changed it's official primary objective from "Law enforcement" to "National security." Why? Because if you claim to fight those terrorists, then you get free money! The government has to increase your funding, otherwise that clearly means they want the terrorists to blow us all up, right? They aren't stupid; they want in on the free ride.
The NSA did get the hint that we're sick of hearing the same BS line that it is fighting terrorists, and so went on a short-lived binge of claiming it was to stop pedophiles. Except it wasn't doing that at all. And their only involvement with anything related to pedophiles is when the FBI took over the Freedom Hosting servers and routed information through NSA servers for a few days as they distributed malware. While Freedom Hosting might have had some CP sites on Tor, that was not the target. TorMail, and similar completely legal services, were. And anybody that visited
any site on FH servers was infected with malware; not just the CP sites. And FH hosted tens of thousands of websites. This is similar to being arrested because you went to a restaurant that was on the same street as a drug dealer.
The NSA has undoubtedly put us all at risk; whether from writing and distributing their own malware, or forcing software/hardware vendors from fixing known vulnerabilities, or even paying them off to implement some backdoors.
What it all comes down to is that the NSA has done nothing but hurt this country (and others) while bolstering itself. It has not done a single thing to our benefit. Anything that they claim they've done to be good for you is a flat-out lie, so I hope you've got your bullshit detectors on. I really wish everything I've said here were nothing but nonsense, but we've come to learn that it is all true.
