My non-trolling question is: why should I care about suspicionless surveillance? I really want to have a solid list of reasons (preferably in single sentences to force clarity). So far, in this debate, I haven't been bothered at all by the surveillance discoveries.
If you want a single sentence, I've heard a quote recently (I'm not sure of the source), but here it is:
If knowledge is power then the corollary is necessarily that privacy is freedom.
We can unpack that some, because it turns out that it's supported by evidence. Studies have shown that people who know they are under surveillance change their behavior. They don't challenge the status quo or participate in creative destruction because they fear being punished for it.
In general, mass surveillance is a tool for the few to control the many. It allows government officials to destroy popular movements by detecting and disrupting them early in their evolution before they gain enough political power to stand on their own. Governments engaging in this sort of political espionage is a historical fact.
Take the analogy of the federal government issuing every member of the NYPD a Humvee and a machine gun, in case they have to fight Taliban insurgents on the streets of New York. Doing so is hugely objectionable, not because we like the Taliban, but because the number of Taliban in New York is small and the number of innocent civilians is large, so the innocent civilians become by far the largest category of individuals who end up eating one of those bullets.
That's the problem with mass surveillance. Government surveillance is a tool of destruction. The reason the NSA is engaged in this surveillance isn't so that they can send you a reminder when you forget to pick up your kid from soccer practice, it's so that they know where to send soldiers to destroy the enemy. But when 99.99% of the people under surveillance are upstanding citizens, what you have is a powerful weapon which we leave sitting around idle just waiting for corruption to take root and redefine who the enemy is.
