[Hoot Gibson]

I look at the Patriot Act the same way I do these programs. Unconstitutional. When governments start picking and choosing which laws they'll follow and which they'll set aside, bad things tend to happen. Starts out as a good thing, hardly ever ends that way.

Reminds me of the CIA sending bags of cash to Afghan President Hamid Karzai. That program started out as a way to pretty MVP guarantee his cooperation, but in fact it ended with CIA still paying him while he publicly accused us of working with the Taliban, who without us being there would have his head dragged through Kandahar, among many other accusations. He kept it up and the cash kept coming, without either Bush or Obama knowing.

I'm to the point where I can hardly trust our government any more. Many people are already there, but I've always been a glass half full type. Getting left out to dry multiple times while in built up quite a bit of disdain for suits sitting behind desks and the entire apparatus really, and all the things that have came out in these last 8 months have just solidified that.

Well said, Vundy. IMO, the politicians - both Democrats or Republicans who support this domestic spying on American systems fall into three categories. The first group is too stupid to understand the consequences of pursuing the massive domestic spying program. The second group knows exactly what the implications of this program are but they have concluded that the world will become such a dangerous place that we have no choice but to surrender our privacy. The third, and most dangerous group, are those people who fully understand what this type of program will eventually be capable of and how much power it will give the group who controls access to the system.

With the emerging database technology that is already being used by companies like LinkedIn and Facebook, it would be very easy to mine the data and identify potential mistresses of a particular candidate or Supreme Court Justice, for example. It would also be pretty easy to build threat profiles for American citizens based on "degrees of separation" from known criminals and terrorists. When I establish a new connection on LinkedIn, my statistics showing how many first, second, and third level contacts I have in my network is updated within a few seconds.

People who argue that the federal government cannot possibly read everybody's email or listen to their phone calls don't have a clue. I already receive transcripts of some voice mail messages through Google. There is no reason to think that does not have the capability to automatically transcribe voice mail message and then use software to search the transcripts for key words.

We are on a slippery slope and our own government will pose a much bigger threat to our freedom than terrorists if we allow them to continue to deploy programs like PRISM.