If there is a situation as dire as the Holocaust, then rhetoric about things being as bad as the Holocaust is no longer useful. Useful points made in a situation that horrifically dire are made with machine guns and bombs, not rhetoric. The proper time for rhetoric is well before the situation ever evolves that far.

We should therefore consider carefully whether a comparison to the Holocaust is out of line or not. Blanket judgement about such comparisons (such as the standard interpretation of "Godwin's Law") are not useful.

Actually, there have been several pretty brutal genocidal events in history that have points of comparison to the Holocaust. In no particular order, it is instructive to look at the Holodomr of Ukraine, Pol Pot, Stalin's purges, the Hutu-Tutsi conflict.

There's no sense in calling forum moderators nazis in general, which is why Godwin came about. But when considering large-scale genocide and surveillance societies, comparisons to Nazi Germany do become relevant.

What I mean is that statements comparing incidents to the Holocaust lack utility if the situation has escalated to the level of brutal genocide. Any sort of statement delivered with words is useless at that point, that isn't the sort of situation that you can talk yourself or somebody else out of. If you want words to have an effect, you need to use them before the situation ever escalates that far.

A house-fire can be prevented with a stern lesson about deep-frying turkeys indoors, but once that actually starts happening, your lecture is of no use. At that point, you need to call in the fire fighters.

Talking about genocides can conceivably prevent a genocide, but talk about genocides can never stop a genocide.

In other words, the U.S.A.'s national security interests bear little resemblance to those of Nazi Germany (I can't believe I have to type that).

It's often forgotten that there were many people in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia or Communist China or North Korea that believe those countries are completely justified in their actions as well. The reason they are widely reviled is because they lost: people outside of their culture came in, beat them down either economically or militarily, and said "That's not okay what you do to your own citizens."

If I look at the facts of what the Nazis did in the 1930s (before the gas chambers and concentration camps), it was that they turned a large portion of their state security apparatus inward and devoted it to controlling a portion of their population that the ruling class deemed undesirable. I don't know whether the same thing goes on at the NSA; I hope it doesn't. I do know that there should be checks & balances to make sure that it doesn't, because it can become an awfully slippery slope.

You can talk about checks and balances all you want, but if you hand a "trusted soldier" a rifle he may yet kill many of the wrong people before he can be stopped. Yet people don't typically lie awake at night staring at the ceiling worrying about the local National Guard violating Posse Comitatus and imposing martial law.

But on the other hand the capability still exists, so we do make at least cursory efforts at mitigating this risk. We perform nominal screening of recruits into the military, we keep most weapons locked up in the armory when the soldiers are at garrison, we train soldiers at all levels of where their allegiance lies, what Posse Comitatus means, etc.

So it is with the NSA. Let's say they determine that the NSA needs the ability to perform surveillance, but that Snowden's revelations have demonstrated that better checks-and-balances are needed, even though there's no evidence of "Stasi-like activity", just to be safe. They go and add these required checks-and-balances.... do you still feel ultra-threatened by NSA?

The problem with the NSA is that if they are abusing their power, nobody will ever know about it, because everybody they deal with is sworn to secrecy. Abuses are far more likely to happen in this situation, not because of any inherent maliciousness, but because whenever you have a large organization that never has to face an opposing viewpoint you end up with groupthink and a large possibility of ill-considered decisions.

I'd be satisfied with detailed congressional oversight. Unfortunately, the last time the NSA director was called before a congressional subcommittee, his statements don't seem to match up with the actual operations of his agency, as they've been leaked since. I hear some congressional reps are pretty mad about that.

Fine, I'll concede the singular moral uniqueness of the government of Germany from 1933 to 1945.

How about the Stasi? The KGB? The COINTELPRO-era FBI? The Star Chamber? These were all arms of governments as legitimate as mine or any other, and their aims were exactly that of every other internal security agency. The harm they did was not some sort of moral corruption, it can't be cured by being the good guys or on the side of the good guys.

These were evil organizations consisting of evil people because of what they did, not why they did it. An East German government without the Stasi is just yet another poorly run postwar client state. The Soviet Union without the KGB (and a few other atrocities) is just a large developing country with some ill-considered economic policies.

Post Church Commission America is just a better version of America. When the children of ex-NSA employees lie to their friends that their father left when they were young because the truth would be embarrassing, it will be a better America still.

What the FUCK, man. Is this seriously how you think? Are all of your moral questions so easily placed into neat little bins?

I don't think there is really an analogy here.

Malware is a fundamentally targeted endeavor since known exploits get patched.

The question of course, is are the targets legitimate?

The NSA's job is to spy on things. TOR represents a place where illegal things occur, so it is a perfectly reasonable thing that they would be tasked with trying to stop such illegal things there.