[Josy]

Originally Posted by Livia

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. It's not as if the government are compiling piles of information purely to snoop on ordinary people with ordinary lives. Anyone with a supermarket loyalty card has information stored and passed on about them - what newspaper you buy, how much you spend... it's all amalgamated by companies like Experian who, from the information gleaned, can take a pretty good guess at which way you vote, for instance, and this information is for sale under the trade name Mosac. I don't see anyone cutting up their loyalty cards though. Also, we're less vigilant about our own personal information than ever with half the country sharing personal info, photos etc. social networks.

We might want to live in a country where personal information is totally personal and no information is collated about anyone. But then we'd see how many terrorists incidents are stopped every year because all those incidents would go ahead and there'd be carnage. Then there'd be a thread on how the security services aren't doing enough. It's not possible to have it all ways.

I don't think these information gleaning tactics are preventing as much attacks from terrorists as some seem to think or are led to believe, Didn't Obama claim that over 50 attacks had been prevented due to the NSA info? a number that was revealed later to seemingly have been plucked out of thin air. (I remember reading something about this so I will try find a link)

There is also a difference IMO when people give out their personal info and then when governments go looking for it for no reason, I just don't see how the metadata is needed, I'm talking about innocent daily activities that are being recorded, calling someone at a certain time for example, if neither people involved have ever been suspected of criminal activities that are threat to security then why does that info need to be recorded?