NSA

Today’s post should be writing itself, too. It’s not because is too big and too small to talk about. We have a huge spying bureaucracy that is trying to use all means available to track possible terrorists and terrorist plots. It has some non-intrusive methods to do so, that also happens to require keeping track of everything done by everyone that every person with a phone line. (Which goes to show how we’ve discounted the term “non-Intrusive.”) For a long time, now, we’ve accepted that much was required if we didn’t want planes being flown into innocent people, again. 

Of course, some of the problem is that people didn’t know what was being kept, what it meant to say “never again, no matter the cost.” And when we started finding out, we didn’t necessarily like it. And even people who were all for it, were less for it when it turned out the President wasn’t always going to be a member of their political party.

In any case, today President Obama has made some changes to what the NSA can do. That the NSA was doing what it was, was in no small part because of changes in attitude. And that Obama had little choice but to require those changes, too, were because attitudes can change back quickly.  At some point, we’re going to fall more one way or the other, and that will be the point when we know what the Crisis has been building to.