The Internet Is a Surveillance State.

A DHS employee asks, “If data about your down-to-the-minute location via metadata from your cell phone is collected by a (government?, private?, does it matter?) database, but no government official actually looks at it until the data pattern indicates you may have committed a crime — is it surveillance?”

To which my answer is, does the data-pattern stop things like the Boston Bombers? Or does it get 85 year old women strip-searched at the airport? And if the answer to the first question is no and the answer to the second question is yes, how the hell does that make anything better????