You're one of the people this [0] comment is talking about.
Also, how can you possibly believe that the NSA are not bad actors? Between trying to hobble encryption, spying on everything, and enabling bad individual actions, and having a horrible success rate [1], what is left to defend?
NSA's competence or success rate doesn't invalidate the need for such an organization. Individuals part of the organization that behave badly don't either. Other states have organizations like the NSA and in order for the USA to defend itself from them the USA also needs one. We don't question the need for a military because one lieutenant burns down a Vietnamese village, we demand justice and changes, but we continue to support the need for a military. That's my thought around the NSA. I support private companies protecting their customers by utilizing encryption and I support the NSA to do whatever they can to amass all the information they can when private companies fail. Why? Because our enemies are doing the same thing. A moral position that loses doesn't last, and for sure there are some moral positions I would stand by them even if it meant losing, but this one isn't one of them. Not for me anyway.
This comment doesn't stand up to any kind of scrutiny whatsoever.
One, handwaving institutional corrupt and violation of the constitution by claiming it's only a few "bad actors" ignores how high up that corruption emenates from. Two, it assumes that the violations are needed for national security, a claim which can easily be dissected by understanding what William Binney has told us about thinthread, just as an singular example in a vast sea of examples. Three, it's a strawman to jump to arguing that because other countries are doing this, we need the NSA too. Very few people are actually calling for the dismembership of the NSA, and in general want accountability and a return to constitutional surveillance. Four, implying the constitution is a "moral position that loses" is absolutely a machievellian, realpolitik, ends-justify-the-means policy position that we and the world have suffered enough consequences and blowback of.
Your entire argument revolves around using the safety as justification for violations of their mandate and oaths, when all the evidence points towards the truth being quite the opposite: the surveillance program has failed to be effective for safety, and not only that, that failure is largely due to this very kind of thinking in the first place! By being willing to undermine the constitution the NSA (et al intel agencies) inherently reduce long term security and safety in the US by allowing bad actors in all kinds of sectors the ability to abuse the data they get.
The totalitarian surveillance system is about control, not safety, always remember that!
"Go again and see not just the film and the play but read the text of Robert Bolt's wonderful play "Man For All Seasons", some of you must have seen it - where Sir Thomas Moore decides that he would rather die than lie or betray his faith and at one moment Moore is arguing with a particularly vicious witch-hunting prosecutor (a servant of the king and a hungry and ambitious man), and Moore says to this man "You'd break the law to punish the Devil, wouldn't you?" And the prosecutor, the witch hunter, says "Break it?" He said "I'd cut down every law in England if I could do that, if I could capture him." And Moore says "Yes you would wouldn't you? And then when you corner the Devil and the Devil turned round to meet you, where would you run for protection? All the laws of England having been cut down and flattened, who would protect you then?" - Christopher Hitchens
Also, how can you possibly believe that the NSA are not bad actors? Between trying to hobble encryption, spying on everything, and enabling bad individual actions, and having a horrible success rate [1], what is left to defend?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24962802
[1] https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/policy-pap...