Any power given to law enforcement will be used. They get tasers -- they start tasing small children, old ladies and people that are already compliant.

Who doesn't break the law?

Smoking weed, a little income under the table, occasional check kiting, skirting sales tax with online purchases, parents lend you money for a house and call it a gift...

Then the minor indescrepencies -- some hyperbole on a resume, scouting out some prostitutes online, a bit of cyber-stalking, calling in sick to get a day off...

Look at how the authorities have prosecuted the drug war -- they chew up good people just to boost numbers and advance careers.

Eventually, this data will be used as a matter of course -- because it will be easy to do, and useful.

That's exactly why the US has a 74,000 page tax code. Not because it takes that many pages to ensure that the tax code is complete and comprehensive, but because it takes that many pages to ensure that almost every single citizen, somehow and somewhere, stands in violation of that code in case they ever need to be prosecuted/persecuted. If someone in power ever wants to punish you (because, say, you're on an "Enemies List" as a purely hypothetical example) all they have to do is audit you (yay) and then punish you for whatever inevitable tax law you run afoul of. If one audit doesn't take, as was the case for the lady starting True the Vote, you can always audit a spouse, a business, etc... People are vulnerable, easy prey these days for the IRS.

I can imagination in a few short years the US having their own version of Gulag for political prisoners.

Additionally, no one has addressed the statistical anomaly of being singled out in a database of over 1,000,000,000 users. A wise choice not to even challenge that one! Somehow you can dream up fears of randomly being strip-searched but when we break it down into numbers (something on which it is harder to let the imagination run) you don’t dare step up to the plate (wisely so).

This point seems rather shaky to me. There are some fairly significant unknowns in your estimate, such as (A) what kinds of queries are being issued and (B) how many "hits" are investigated to an extent that people would consider intrusive.

(A) is largely an unknown, and will remain so if such information grabs aren't seen by a judge and come with an attached gag order. It's not unreasonable to think that a query for attributes like "reads about computer security", "objects to US foreign policy" and "lives in area X" might be issued - how small a result set might this return? Without some kind of oversight and transparency, I think it's short-sighted to dismiss off-hand the possibility of ending up "on a list" as the result of something like this. Also, are searches really limited to likely indicators of illegal activity? What about whistleblowers, activists or members of the press?

(B) is also rather fuzzy given the information we currently have. We don't really know how this data is used. Perhaps a summary of everybody's pornographic preferences and searches relating to embarrassing medical conditions is attached to their file. Perhaps somebody with access to this database will seek to sell such information, or use it against somebody they dislike. For example, there have been dozens of arrests of senior police officers in the UK recently as the result of investigations into sensitive information being sold to the press/private companies (e.g. Detective Chief Inspector April Casburn of the National Terrorist Financial Investigation Unit - a senior counter-terrorism officer).

Consider that a silly tweet or Facebook post is now enough to get you shaken down for several hours by DHS.

I'm not being harmed, but other good people are. But because it's not me, I shouldn't care? That kind of logic only flies in America...

And yet, no American that has posted has even mentioned or implied such a thing. Smh.

Um, except L. Spiro...

And even if he didn't, and even if I wasn't just making an opportunistic jab, the thread is about American citizens losing their rights, and it's pretty fair to say that America has a culture of selfishness, and that these opinions of indifference towards the loss of civil liberties are heavily popularized there...

The US has multiple overlapping cultural values, just like anywhere else. You could also claim the opposite, that there's heavily popularized pushes for more civil liberties, ie libertarians and the Pauls, Rand and Ron, although like everything there's petty devolutions of the core message. And there's that whole scandal with the leak investigation and Justice Department, and the fact that it is a public scandal rather than lurking unseen. Plus the ACLU has been active since forever...

L. Spiro, IIRC, is an American ex-pat who has been working in various Asian countries for at least a decade.

@ Prinz Eugn

There is no such thing as "cultural values" over here - the term sound nice, but does not actually exist.

Best that the US has is race/religion laws that add more bureaucracy, and folks abuse the #### out of.

And suddenly I'm getting ads for local defense attorneys, instead of Daz3d jailbait or Eazyfuscator...FBI should just hire one of these ad companies to tell them who might be worth an extra look.

"Dzhokhar: Deals in Home & Kitchen"

If I choose to do business or share information with another private party,

But that's the thing, the majority of people don't even know they're being tracked. They aren't "choosing" to give information, they are being (legally) spied on without their knowledge. Even us techy people sometimes don't realize how much information Google is collecting on us; see this thread for one example.
I only just found out while googling (gah!) that Google tracks (or at least has the potential to track) what pages on an individual non-Google website you visit, even if it doesn't have the +1s, because most websites have Google Analytics built in. This is also likely their motivation for GoogleDNS, and part of the future benefit of Google Fiber (though the real push of Google Fiber is to increase content distribution and software over the web, which a stronger network is needed for, so google can continue to sell ad impressions).

whether an individual or business, small or large, I don't see why it automatically follows that the Government should have access.

It doesn't directly follow, but if Google is already selling information to 3rd parties, it ends up being that every fortune 500 company knows all your details, but the government doesn't. So then the corporations know all the details of those who work in the government, or in politics, but the government doesn't know all the details of those who work for the corporations.

If it's part of the job of the government to police the corporations to prevent them from oppressing the people (not that this is fully occurring yet in the USA, we're still a far shot from anything anywhere near oppression), but the government decreases in power, and the corporations increase in power, it creates imbalances.

I'm not pro big-business, nor am I pro big-government. I feel like there needs to be a really strong balance, where the government keeps businesses in check, but the people keep the government in check. However, people (including myself) are too lazy, misinformed, or self-entitled to make that a reality.

If Google was selling information that was personally identifying to individuals, then that's bad too. (In the UK at least, there are laws regulating this.)

The UK laws, from what little I understand, do alot better than american laws. The UK government seems to do a better job overall of holding corporations to good limitations, whereas the USA government often writes laws grossly in favor of corporations at the expense of consumers.

However, I was mistaken about Google selling our personal information to third parties - it just uses it inhouse to target individuals for third party ads. My mistake! It does leak a little personal information though.

True, there are arguments against big businesses having this info too, but two wrongs don't make a right, that's part of the same argument. Indeed, one argument against big business having such information is that it's easier for other people to get that info.

Yeah, I'm not advocating for Google to give the information to the FBI. Though specific information on specific individuals through warrants I think is fine. I agree that given the two choices, "Google has the information", and "Google and the FBI has the information", the former is preferred. I guess I was just trying to toss another potato in the pot, that the cry of "FBI is demanding our implicitly collected personal information from Google!" should also be met with the thought, "Wait, why does Google have our information to begin with?".

That's part of what I find so silly. People give all this information, and make it public, and then protest when the FBI wants to consolidate public information into one location.

Can you show me examples where people complaining about this are also posting private details publically on the Internet?

I remember reading articles a few years back with alot of furor over one of the government databases, which was planning to crawl social networks. I forget which one - I wish I could remember the name and find the articles. This was two or three years ago.

And don't you think the people complaining the loudest about this kind of thing, are going to be the people less likely to post their information publicly?

Yep, definitely. But in this case the vocal minority are speaking up about an issue that most of the silent majority isn't even aware of, and that affects everybody. If I give a company information, that's a choice I make. It's the interconnecting of information I gave to many separate companies, as well as the automatic tracking of everything I do that makes me feel uncomfortable. It's not something I lose sleep over, but it's something I'm, not "concerned", but "aware of" as a threat.

@ Prinz Eugn

There is no such thing as "cultural values" over here - the term sound nice, but does not actually exist.

Best that the US has is race/religion laws that add more bureaucracy, and folks abuse the #### out of.

There are- there just aren't any universal ones, which was my point. Values exist whether they're enshrined in law or not.

Right now, we have a military complex whose top leaders are listening attentively to a guy who characterizes all Christians as "fundamentalist monsters"

[citation needed]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-l-weinstein/fundamentalist-christian-_b_3072651.html?utm_hp_ref=email_share

Quote from the article: "Today, we face incredibly well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Christianity upon their helpless subordinates in our nation's armed forces."

That doesn't sound like "all Christians = fundie monsters" to me. In fact, he even says "twisted version of Christianity" - as in, not actual Christianity. So it would seem that your "source" doesn't actually support your point.

Oh, and this article is setting off my Poe's law detector, too. Who is this guy, again?

@Oberon_Command

Huffington Post is not a good source for information. It;s more of an "opinion" site, than a news agency.