Assume for just a moment that nobody with tyrannical notions could ever be in a position to use the vaults of data the U.S. government is storing, apparently in perpetuity, for nefarious purposes.
That the people in charge of the CIA, NSA and FBI would never ever ever skirt the spirit of the Constitution or the letter of the law.
That the Patriot Act will be, from now on, "just for a worst case scenario," not actually employed in a dark manner that has nothing to do with the actual requirements of national security.
Assume that the special court which gives secret approvals to secret warrants would never ever operate as a rubber-stamp.
Assume that, given the high regard and hands-off, almost adoring attitude with which the executive branch of our government has treated whistleblowers will continue.
Assume that congressional committees charged with oversight of the intelligence agencies and chaired by men and women every bit the guardian of civil liberties that Dianne Feinstein has been will give us a shout-out should somebody or a group of somebodies overstep their boundaries and treat the Fourth Amendment as toilet paper.
Even assuming all these fantasies to be true, what about what Conors Friedersdorf thinks could happen in "What If China Hacks the NSA's Massive Data Trove?"
Bradley Manning proved that massive amounts of the government's most secret data was vulnerable to being dumped on the open Internet. A single individual achieved that unprecedented leak. According to the Washington Post, "An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances." And this week, we learned that the FBI, CIA and NSA were unable to protect some of their most closely held secrets from Glenn Greenwald, Richard Engel, Robert Windrem, Barton Gellman, and Laura Poitras. Those journalists, talented as they are, possess somewhat fewer resources than foreign governments! So I naturally started to think about all the data the NSA is storing.
In the wrong hands, it could enable blackmail on a massive scale, widespread manipulation of U.S. politics, industrial espionage against American businesses;,and other mischief I can't even imagine. [...]
Even assuming the U.S. government never abuses this data -- and there is no reason to assume that! -- why isn't the burgeoning trove more dangerous to keep than it is to foreswear? Can anyone persuasively argue that it's virtually impossible for a foreign power to ever gain access to it? Can anyone persuasively argue that if they did gain access to years of private phone records, email, private files, and other data on millions of Americans, it wouldn't be hugely damaging?
Think of all the things the ruling class never thought we'd find out about the War on Terrorism that we now know.
Well, sure, okay, but, c'mon now, have we learned anything about the carrying out of the war of terror that is even slightly disturbing to anybody but pearl clutchers?