Let me restate a little more succinctly: I'm asking about what the NSA has done that's comparable to "secret lists of enemies of the state that public sector employers agree to not hire" or "attempting to drive a political figure to suicide". Implicit in my question is a "null hypothesis" that such things have not happened.
Spying for economic advantage is not new, nor unique to the USA, and not in the least comparable to the examples I listed. It's not even in the same category.
People spying on their girlfriends or love interests happens a lot more outside the NSA than from within, and is not comparable.
A woman was "affected" by being approached and asked about doing research on pressure cookers after a pressure cooker bomb killed people? What does this have to do with NSA activity, and how is that comparable?
Parallel Construction also exists to protect secret informants for quite some time, and the justification is obvious: not everything law enforcement knows needs to be shared with the defense and their friends during a trial.
This is off of the original topic, but yes, warrantless searches are sometimes unconstitutional, and while the framing fathers had a lot of foresight, I don't think they could have foreseen the state of the world as it is now. Falling back on "300 years ago some really smart guys wrote this into law" is not a good justification for something being a bad thing. Some things in the constitution have been reinterpreted by courts and others have been nullified by amendments since then. Redefining "search" to be different from "retention" is not the most surprising interpretation of the law I've seen.
Please list an example that is comparable to the misdeeds Assange compares those of the NSA to.
Comments
Let me restate a little more succinctly: I'm asking about what the NSA has done that's comparable to "secret lists of enemies of the state that public sector employers agree to not hire" or "attempting to drive a political figure to suicide". Implicit in my question is a "null hypothesis" that such things have not happened.
Spying for economic advantage is not new, nor unique to the USA, and not in the least comparable to the examples I listed. It's not even in the same category.
People spying on their girlfriends or love interests happens a lot more outside the NSA than from within, and is not comparable.
A woman was "affected" by being approached and asked about doing research on pressure cookers after a pressure cooker bomb killed people? What does this have to do with NSA activity, and how is that comparable?
Parallel Construction also exists to protect secret informants for quite some time, and the justification is obvious: not everything law enforcement knows needs to be shared with the defense and their friends during a trial.
This is off of the original topic, but yes, warrantless searches are sometimes unconstitutional, and while the framing fathers had a lot of foresight, I don't think they could have foreseen the state of the world as it is now. Falling back on "300 years ago some really smart guys wrote this into law" is not a good justification for something being a bad thing. Some things in the constitution have been reinterpreted by courts and others have been nullified by amendments since then. Redefining "search" to be different from "retention" is not the most surprising interpretation of the law I've seen.
Please list an example that is comparable to the misdeeds Assange compares those of the NSA to.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism#Blacklists