So I don't want my liberties to come from my ability to avoid tracking. I want it to come from allowing me to live my life in the way I want to live my life, and not give puritans the ability to pass laws that says I can't. Whatever vices I have, if "I'm not hurting anybody" I shouldn't care if the NSA knows whatever I'm doing, as long as they can't act on it.
You should care. First, the "I'm not doing anything wrong" defense didn't stop IRS targeting of people operating business names that went against a particular political party, for example.
Blatant abuse of seemingly safe data to collect in a database, overall, but used for an inappropriate purpose. Not a soul went to jail over it, either. We all know this.
And that's the thing with databases. As one of my programming professors said long ago, "Think long and hard about the required longevity of the data your program is using, and whether or not it really needs to be retained in a database. Databases can easily be used for good or evil. Joining databases can reveal things otherwise not intended to be revealed by the two standing alone." She wrote code for DoD for twenty years before getting out and teaching instead.
It's been nearly 20 years since she said that to our class, and "data mining" and "big data" are now all the rage. Marketers and spooks alike, know more about everyone than ever. Whether good or bad, depends upon how the data is used, and we've seen above that political party cultists are more than willing to abuse it. And that abuse may include agencies with the power of already nearly having the power of making their own laws.
As far as NSA goes, you could maybe change that statement to FBI and I'd agree, but NSA supposedly is specifically barred from monitoring and surveillance of Citizens without cause inside the borders. They're in someone else's swim lane, so to speak.
FBI supposedly also needs warrants for certain forms of surveillance, but FISA courts with a different set of rules than our normal courts are here to stay, it looks like, and warrantless wire taps on a mass scale have been uncovered for roughly two decades now. Telecoms specifically requested and were granted immunity once they realized that cat was out of the bag, for example.
Reality is... There's now "joint" database aggregators between agencies after the kerfkuffle that they "didn't properly share information" on things like 9-11. Those are the places the databases get queried together...
(New Mexico and Utah appear to be leading the charge in suckling from that debt-driven teat. But that's a different conversation...)
... and one of those "aggregators" triggered the John and Martha King takedown... Via aviation data mixed with who knows what other data in a poorly designed query in a couple of databases.
I don't know about you, but I've seen what most software coders write for database queries, and I'm not too convinced having that trigger people showing up with guns, is a good idea, overall.
To be less "emotional" about it and more "pragmatic", we need to look hard at the costs of it all versus the gains. And we can't. The bill is a available to the public, but the results are secrets. But we can definitely see its damned expensive. Data centers the size of small cities, even in Utah, aren't cheap.
In summary, I think you should be a bit more concerned, especially about the price tag, but also about possible abuse of any form of collected data.
We've already seen that you don't need to be a criminal at all to be targeted by "low level staffers in Cincinnati". Just disagree with the political party cult currently in power at any given time and you'll "get the message" via a nice "come in for an audit" letter. This isn't tin foil, this is our new reality as of the time we allowed them to get away with it. As if we had a choice.
I paid cash for a pickup truck. I had to fill out a special tracking form to flag myself as a possible criminal when I made the large withdrawal at my bank. The bank had no choice but to comply. Some database somewhere had the Boolean for "large cash withdrawals" turned on in it in my data row that day. Another database has "pilot". Another might have "flies in desert southwest regularly", or that's just a table join away. Etc.
Making data collection easier in the world where the databases are allowed to be combined for purposes other than their original intent, even if we believe the intent is "safety", is problematic. At best.
