Re: At what point will conservatives admit Bush has gone too far?
I am not going to interfere in this US discussion, but I think that in most of these discussions the average citizen (not necessarily average "politard" [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]) is not aware that the current datamining surveillance techniques are incredible powerful and sophisticated (i.e. how many know that CIA are able to turn on the microphone on whatever cellular phone they would like to, and thus bug the room, at any time without the user noticing?). I think that if more people were aware of that, more scepticism would arise to how extensive it should be.
In Norway we had a scandal regarding previous extensive use of surveillance a decade ago. It was concluded that we are better off with less surveillance and more terror etc. than with maximum surveillance, and now the surveillance authorities' power is limited, but that's a judgement for each country to make (which surely isn't easy).
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