While the recent IRS disclosures of targeting Tea Party activists is deplorable, I'm still optimistic that it's the exception and not the rule in the US.
Criminals gaining this access is definitely plausible.
Foreign governments using it for oppression/retaliation is also very plausible.
I think the parent is slightly "better" in the followings senses. First, I think "surveillance state can be used to oppress citizens" is less novel a thought (though maybe I'm optimistic?). Second, yours presumes a corrupt government eager to secure its power, while parent presumes a corrupt individual eager to make money. While the former is not exactly remote, the latter is (I think) even more common.
What would it matter? Does the extra lead time make it somehow easier to crush a protest (since we are assuming a tyrannical government). I am pretty sure you could get drones airborne and shooting missiles at protesters pretty quickly with or without NSA wiretapping.
No that's not what you do. If you have enough time, first you insert some fool like Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich into the movement, and slowly dismantle it from the inside (the Tea Party). If you need something quick, you insert a provocateur into the group that instigates some kind of violence that makes the whole group look stupid.
Or to predict elections. I'd recommend anyone running an election against a sitting president to encrypt all their email, probably with an encryption scheme not endorsed by NIST/NSA... or at a sufficiently high encryption level. Imagine preparing for a televised debate when you can access the competition's correspondence?
Why does NSA endorsement of an encryption scheme mean anything, after hundreds of thousands of man-hours have been spent auditing and attempting to break those systems?
Auditing is more important than origins. See also, Tor.
The days of DES S-boxes are behind us, and in fact, the NSA's meddling helped the security of that scheme, though that fact wasn't known until decades later.
I'm not an encryption expert. I didn't mean to start that argument, sorry. But personally, I would rather use encryption now that didn't originate in an NSA lab than one that did. But I believe Snowden that the NSA probably doesn't try to crack much good encryption, and they have a good time finding easier vectors to read encrypted data.
Anyhow, my main reason for making my comment above was just that if politicians really stopped to think how the surveillance can hurt them personally, instead of scoffing at us commoners who are under surveillance, they might start to change their tune. My first thought when hearing all this news was just a thought of Bush/Obama reading politicians' emails about senate/house bills before going around bargaining with them (or more realistically, some mid-level staffer getting at that info and then summarizing it so the top-level politicians' hands never get dirty).
That's what makes me surprised that both political parties are on board with this. It has the potential to make the Watergate burglaries look positively small time.
What, exactly, stops one political party from using this system against the other one? They're all up in arms about the IRS thing, but either party could very easily adapt a system like this into the most powerful opposition research tool ever known.
Even more interesting is that, with loose controls like these, we have to assume that enemy spies are able to see everything. So every other country with half-decent spies can just tap the whole country's communications and blackmail any and everyone in power with whatever they find using the systems we set up on our own.
"So every other country with half-decent spies can just tap the whole country's communications and blackmail any and everyone in power with whatever they find using the systems we set up on our own."
I'd imagine the spy world has already realized this, and we're already at a level of mutually assured blackmail. :)
I was about to say the same thing, but you said it much better.
In fact, I think this state of affairs by and large predates the digital age, which is why there are so many "gentleman's agreements" and semi-informal reciprocal codes of honour among intelligence organisations. They have their roots in the Cold War.
For instance, Russia's FSB recently received some opprobrium for revealing the identity of a CIA operative in Russia. It's not because the FSB doesn't know who they are; the FSB knows who they are, and the CIA knows that the FSB knows who they are, and they both know far more about each other's intelligence operations than we realise. It's just not the custom to come out and publicise this information.
