User blog comment:Semanticdrifter/Digital Protest Against the FISA Improvements Act/@comment-5762703-20140206084313/@comment-207.172.201.13-20140206134138

CoD4 covered the main points, but missed one of the critical ones: it's not about security, it's about control.

The existing law and 4th Amendment already provide all the legal power that law enforcement needs to spy on suspected or potential criminals. The NSA (and Britain's GCHQ) are collecting all kinds of data on all people's activities, online and otherwise, even when they're under no suspicion of wrongdoing. This means wasting billions of taxpayer dollars and unknown man-hours of effort (and violating the entire nation's privacy wholesale) on spying which is totally pointless. Number of actual crimes prevented by this method: exactly zero.

This spying is extremely dangerous in a nation where the president claims unlimited power to imprison or murder anyone at all without any due process whatsoever, and has already had his own citizens killed just for having certain opinions. (No, that's not an exaggeration--I suggest doing a little reading on a fellow named Anwar Al-Awlaki.) This government has established the policy that anyone can be locked up forever based on nothing but unsubstantiated accusations.

The NSA's activies have nothing to do with stopping terrorists or other criminals. Even if they could be trusted with everyone's personal info, which they clearly can't, the Constitution makes it crystal clear that there's no justification for collecting it in the first place. That's what the protest is about.