>1. Schneier is calling for people to break the law at great risk to themselves on the ground that the government's current position is immoral (but not illegal).
Man do I hate this objection. Would you have behaved the same in Nazi germany? "Come on! You're asking people to break the law! It's illegal to tell anyone about our plant for murdering disabled people.". Well, yes. Because a corrupt entity has control of the laws and is making it illegal to point out the illegal activities said entity is engaging in.
Collecting people's phone records, while objectionable, is not on the same moral plane as murdering them; and I've already explained at some length how Americans' telephony records are not considered to be private information for >30 years.
See, this is why I object to what Schneier is doing. He has you equating the confidentiality of phone records with human lives.
You're not thinking big picture. The government is building an infrastructure for citizen monitoring on a scale that has never before been conceived. That same government has already abused virtually every power they've ever been given. No, we know of no Gasto-style "disappearing" as of yet but there's really nothing holding it back but luck as far as I can see. How much longer is our luck going to hold out?
And we don't need to put ourselves as the mercy of the worst people in government. We don't need to allow this stuff as it buys us practically nothing. Terrorism isn't a legitimate threat to America and never has been. Even if we utterly ignored terrorism it will never be more than line noise compared to things like heart disease, vehicular death and so on.
What are you saying? Those people see something holding back Gestapo-style "disappearing"s? Or they think that it's already happening? In the cases you mentioned, the people were too high profile to be completely disappeared but how they have been handled is despicable enough.
Man do I hate this objection. Would you have behaved the same in Nazi germany? "Come on! You're asking people to break the law! It's illegal to tell anyone about our plant for murdering disabled people.". Well, yes. Because a corrupt entity has control of the laws and is making it illegal to point out the illegal activities said entity is engaging in.