Left and right, no one likes what the NSA is doing.

Watching ABC's This Week was interesting, as everyone was universally against the way our government has been prosecuting the War on Terror, as it related to spying domestically.  They all felt that these programs should have been publicly known so that we could debate their merits.  As Paul Krugman related, we look like an authoritarian state, and I agree.

As I wrote previously, there's little risk of making these programs known publicly.  Those terrorists who weren't already paranoid, were either dead or soon to be dead, and the rest were already trying their best to not be caught.  Bin Laden lived so long because he was paranoid and went dark; none of these recently revealed programs would have caught him, even if he lived in the US.

While it shouldn't surprise terrorists, it does surprise the rest of us, because we're not doing anything wrong yet our data is nonetheless being collected, sometimes accidentally.  And we have yet to know the full extent of domestic spying and data collection of American citizens.  But think about what our Canadian, Australian and other friends around the world think of us.  They have no say in whether or not their data is being collected by the NSA.  This is the hallmark of an authoritarian state, yes?