Well, the hardest pulling argument I have for privacy is the following:
1. The government claims it must violate everyone's privacy in order to look for a few individuals, planning terrorist act X.
2. Though I wasn't involved in X before, I now go out of my way to avoid appearing sympathetic to X or involved in Y, which, while different from X, is adjacent to X, and therefore suspect in the eyes of the government who are hunting X. By a broad and ridiculous interpretation of X, X and Y come to be equal in the eyes of the government.
3. Discussions of or relating to X and Y are squelched sans privacy for fear of backlash; Z is next on the chopping block because it is adjacent to Y. At the start of this chain of events, discussion of Z was probably not quite mainstream, but it was certainly not equated to X, which was never acceptable by anyone. Thus, the slide from X to Z is complete, and the fallout from whatever is after Z can begin.
Dissent is treated like treason in the USA.
Anyone with an opinion that differs from the government has their speech targeted by reductions in privacy, and their speech will likely be chilled the more the government pushes the dissent-as-terrorism angle that they've shown to be keen for. They've already pulled "journalism", "privacy", "aiding or abetting by making youtube videos", "protesting", "whistleblowing" and "terrorism" into the same perverted continuum.
1. The government claims it must violate everyone's privacy in order to look for a few individuals, planning terrorist act X.
2. Though I wasn't involved in X before, I now go out of my way to avoid appearing sympathetic to X or involved in Y, which, while different from X, is adjacent to X, and therefore suspect in the eyes of the government who are hunting X. By a broad and ridiculous interpretation of X, X and Y come to be equal in the eyes of the government.
3. Discussions of or relating to X and Y are squelched sans privacy for fear of backlash; Z is next on the chopping block because it is adjacent to Y. At the start of this chain of events, discussion of Z was probably not quite mainstream, but it was certainly not equated to X, which was never acceptable by anyone. Thus, the slide from X to Z is complete, and the fallout from whatever is after Z can begin.
Dissent is treated like treason in the USA.
Anyone with an opinion that differs from the government has their speech targeted by reductions in privacy, and their speech will likely be chilled the more the government pushes the dissent-as-terrorism angle that they've shown to be keen for. They've already pulled "journalism", "privacy", "aiding or abetting by making youtube videos", "protesting", "whistleblowing" and "terrorism" into the same perverted continuum.