Eight things that are bigger threats to our civil liberties and democracy than PRISM

Update 2013-08-05: Nope! I was wrong, wrong, wrong. The PRISM data is being shared with drug enforcement agencies to build cases, and then the origin of the data is being concealed by the DEA because they know they're not supposed to have it. This is pure abuse of the surveillance powers they've given themselves for a purpose totally unrelated to national security. I retract my position below: shut it down.


I continue to believe we are paying way too much attention to PRISM, and that PRISM is not that big a deal, and the government can keep doing it if it wants to, though I don't believe it's particularly effective. This has not been a popular stance.

So by way of counter-argument, here are some things I do think are a big deal, and are genuine threats to our democracy. You may or may not consider it a cop-out that the first two are related to PRISM, but I don't think so. I don't like PRISM, I just don't think it's important.

These are in no order other than that in which I thought of them; they are especially not in order of importance.

This list also excludes major political issues (such as tax law, and immigration) that are not related to civil liberties but I also think are more important than PRISM.