> I think it's interesting to ask why these programs are so widely hated.
Well as someone with a history degree let me explain....
> These are national security assets: evidence gathered here will never be used in a drug case, or a tax evasion case. Why not? These tools exist for the bigger fish: the dozens of Soviet-era nuclear weapons believed to be missing, or the small amounts of dangerous pathogens that periodically vanish from research labs. These are what the government is worried about, and they're not going to risk revealing their methods for something lesser.
I think that misses the historical abuses here. The question is who decides what is a big fish or not and on what criteria. Additionally what happens to the bigger fish when they are just good enough at hiding evidence that they cannot be prosecuted for bigger fish crimes (or more to the point when the NSA thinks this is what is happening)? Don't you think that at that point, those vast archives would not be repurposed to answer the demand to "find me the crime?" And given the vagueness of many federal laws, don't you think that would be an easy task on anyone?
The problem isn't in prosecuting people who unambiguously broke the law. The problem is in making those vast resources available to carry out the fight against the "bigger fish" by any means necessary. This enables an environment where "show me the man and I'll find you the crime" becomes an acceptable way to deal with "bad people" (but "being bad" is unconstitutionally vague as a criminal statute). This sort of thing is entirely common in history, from the Star Chamber to the FISC, and from antiquity to the present.
> These are what the government is worried about, and they're not going to risk revealing their methods for something lesser.
Ok, so suppose a senator starts leaking classified information of this sort. Do you think that such archives might be useful for ensuring that all manner of vague federal felony prosecutions could be used to silence and discredit him? Does he become a big fish at that point?
> Warren Buffet has predicted a major nuclear terrorist attack on an American city to be a "virtual certainty" given enough time.
Sure, it's a virtual certainty given enough time. However, suppose we get incredibly unlucky and one gets through every 100 years or so. The personal risk to an American is insignificant compared to all manner of things we take for granted every day (such as driving home from work). Saying this makes us safer just doesn't cut it.
> What counts as "terrorism" is political, after all.
Bingo. The KKK has been called terrorist before (in fact Justice Thomas said as much in one of his dissents, where he argued that cross burning was unprotected by the first amendment), but if we give up the first amendment regarding terrorism don't we go right back to the McCarthy era before Yates v. United States was decided and terrorism and sedition prosecutions were common for the mere act of distributing writings of Karl Marx?
> It's important to remember that we still have a functioning democracy.
The facade of one at least. We all know who is really in power and it is not the people.
> If you -- Hacker News reader -- decided to run for congress tomorrow, you might not win, but you won't be killed, sabotaged, or secretly blocked. While some individual politicans may be corrupt, the system broadly is not.
Being in Indonesia, in a place obviously corrupt, and seeing how things function, has given me a very different look at corruption in the US. I don't concur with your assessment about corruption. Americans are just a lot more refined about it.
If you are so sure that the system isn't corrupt, then who do you think would get a harsher sentence in court, the poor black man with three grams of crack cocaine or the suburban white man with 20 pot plants or 50 grams of powder cocaine? Defence atty Billy Murphy has sometimes said that drug legalization is working for the upper classes because they just get probation and treatment, and so it is time to bring it to the lower classes. Moreover every attempt to make the system more predictable just pushes the actual decisions to smaller groups of people. Mandatory sentencing for example shifts power from judges to prosecutors. A government of laws is thus nothing more than a convenient fiction we use to avoid holding certain people accountable.
> These programs, hidden in the background, don't inconvenience you, or lead to loss of freedom or property.
That's totally false. As you put it, terrorism is politically defined. Giving the government dragnet surveillance powers in the fight against a politically defined and vague thing essentially restricts political freedom. Would you say that the USAPATRIOT, AEDPA, and friends do not restrict the ability to start up a Hamas USA political party? No you wouldn't and you couldn't after HPL v Holder. But you can't differentiate any of this from what our country went through with the Smith Act before it was castrated (thankfully) by the Supreme Court in Yates v. United States.
In the words of singer-songwriter Jack Warshaw in a song written about another era,
They came for Sacco, Vanzetti, Connoly, and Pearce in their time
They came for Newton and Seale, and the Panthers and some of their friends
In Boston, Chicago, Santiago, Warsaw and Belfast
And places that never make headlines, the list never ends
....
They say that here we are free to live our lives as we please
To march and to write and to sing as long as we do it alone
But do it together with comrades united and strong
And they'll take you away for long rest with walls and barbed wire for a home
The song echos essentially a fear of the use of law enforcement powers generally to be used to crack down on groups deemed politically troublesome (Sacco and Vanzetti were tried for murder but there has been a long tradition of seeing them as innocent targets due to their anarchist affiliations, Connoly and Pearce were involved in the Easter Uprising in Ireland, Newton and Seale were prosecuted for various things related to their involvement with the Black Panthers.
There is a long tradition in this country of seeing certain groups as political prisoners (whether the Panthers or the Molly MacGuires) and a tradition which is founded on actual experience (whether Martin Luther King or the Communist Party USA). You can't sweep all that under the rug and say that 9/11 made all that obsolete. The fears are real and whether in any individual case historicaly there may or may not have been real justice done the fact remains that political prisoners have existed in our country at various times (there are reasons to think that Sacco and Vanzetti may have actually been guilty of murder, but their trial was not fair regardless, and there is no doubt that people were thrown in jail at one point for merely distributing Marxist literature).