US intelligence mining data from 9 US Internet companies in broad secret program

Posting something on a website is vastly different than direct person to person communication over the phone or mailing something. Phone calls and snail mail are transient things, the post office and phone company don't keep copies of your conversations and mail for later investigation whereas posting something on a website is communicating through a third party who stores everything in a database for later display, it's not transient, you'd be a fool to post something you want to remain private on Facebook, or any internet website. Phones and mail also enjoy legal protection that the Internet doesn't and Facebook isn't a carrier of transient information, it's a database that stores things possibly forever. They are nothing alike.

    "These are national security assets: evidence gathered 
    here will never be used in a drug case, or a tax evasion 
    case."

Funny, that's what they said about the PATRIOT act, yet virtually all invocations of said act have had nothing to do with terrorism (e.g. drug arrests). If you give the government these powers you are assuming there will never be someone in charge of this information who is corrupt. But corrupt people are already in charge of it! This will only get worse.

>Warren Buffet has predicted a major nuclear terrorist attack on an American city to be a "virtual certainty" given enough time.

Buffet probably has no idea what would be involved in pulling off a nuclear attack. Hint: "dirty bombs" is just made up nonsense.

If I had the money to make it interesting for him, I'd take a long bet on this one and even leave it open ended. I'm sure we'll all be dead before it happens.

>Ok, but no one here is going to argue that stopping terrorism is bad

I do. Terrorism isn't a legitimate concern for the US. Over the last 30 years, we've had around 100 deaths per year. That about a drop of piss in the ocean. Not worth even thinking about for one second. Us all those resources to do something that would have an effect like fighting cancer, making highways safer, etc.

Fighting terrorism as the US does is like doing extreme chemo therapy for a sniffle.

>It's important to remember that we still have a functioning democracy.

Really? Go look up some executive orders that have come out of the president's office (past as well as present). This paragraph is more a hope about how things should be then proof of how they are. Ask yourself how you can know any of it's true. It's legal to take pictures of cops, yet if you do it you could end in jail anyway. It's illegal for cops to rape and murder, yet it happens and often enough with no real consequence to the cop.

>Extreme efforts such as these may still be insufficient to prevent New York from being destroyed by terrorists.

Then why bother? We're only giving corrupt people unchecked power to lord over us and we're getting back a small chance that we might possible prevent some attack that might possibly happen (but if you look at the actual history of terrorist attacks, they usually fail from their own incompetence).

>However, do not forget that we can't see NSA success stories.

Then why would we assume any exist. The onus is on those who violate us to prove it's providing some value.

>hidden in the background, don't inconvenience you, or lead to loss of freedom or property.

Of course they do. They expose we to the whims of low paid morons on power trips.

> But the incentives the intelligence apparatus have to not use any data collected here against anyone for reasons less than "real" terrorism are strong enough, that I think it's not open-and-shut.

Complete and utter bullshit. Have you actually looked at e.g. what the PATRIOT act has actually been used for? Hint: terrorism is line noise in the application of that act. It's used for almost anything but.