You know what? This whole fucking thing has me deeply pissed off and I'm going to tell you all why.

There's this notion that "maybe we overvalue privacy" or "are we standing in the way of our appointed guardians" or "privacy is passé in the Facebook era" and other assorted bullshit. It's all a ruse. It's all a misdirection. It's all an attempt to get you to stop paying attention to the fundamental issue at hand.

It boils down to this:

1) The NSA is not allowed to spy on American citizens without probable cause.

2) But the NSA is spying on American citizens without probable cause.

In any universe other than bizarro-world, what follows is

3) Well, the NSA shouldn't do that. We should stop them.

But where we're being led, by the whole of the American counter-intelligence apparatus, is

3a) Well, since they're doing it anyway, maybe we should let them.

No. NO! A thousand times no. Try this on for size:

1) I'm not allowed to stab my neighbors to death.

2) But I just stabbed a neighbor to death.

3) kleinbl00 goes to jail forever.

3a) Well, since he's started, maybe we should let him continue to stab neighbors to death.

There's no argument here. There aren't two sides. There isn't an assemblage of pros and cons. People whose job it is to determine what the NSA can and cannot do decided a long fucking time ago that the NSA is NOT ALLOWED TO DO THIS. They went and did it anyway. Can they point to any concrete improvements it has made in anyone's lives? No, they can't. Why? Oh, not because there haven't been any, but because it's all so secret.

There are more people with top secret clearances in the United States than there are people who live in Austin Texas. And, thanks to compartmentalization, each and every one of them can know absolutely nothing about what everyone else is doing. That way, nobody has to be responsible.

Enough. This is not a thorny issue, this is a violation of the law and people need to stop wringing their hands about it as if there was some sort of terrible choice that has to be made.

There isn't. The NSA is in violation of its charter. Has been for a long fucking time. Full stop.

I'm done. Keep your hypotheticals to yourself; I'll be at Walgreens.