> However that has nothing to do with whether we should attempt to control NSA dragnet surveillance with technology after the fact
It's almost like there was a reason I explicitly disclaimed NSA when I made the point you responded to.
Even besides the IRS, what about FBI, local law enforcement, ATF, Border Patrol, and all of those other Federal agencies that have arrest powers? Should the local Good ol' Boy sheriff be able to pull up your record in NCIC with no audit trail?
I don't believe you should have a record in NCIC unless there's a very good reason, just as I don't believe the US should be collecting and storing fingerprints of visitors at the border, or collecting the phone records of every American, or the GCHQ collecting almost all the data that passes through the UK and passing it back to the NSA. The mere act of collating all that information and storing it indefinitely is incredibly dangerous, and some logging of access is not going to make it safer. So this is why I reject the premise of your question.
Not collecting all that information in a central record is the best defence against misuse - if you collect it, it will at some point in the future be misused, just as Hoover, Nixon, the GDR etc misused the far more limited powers they were given.
It's almost like there was a reason I explicitly disclaimed NSA when I made the point you responded to.
Even besides the IRS, what about FBI, local law enforcement, ATF, Border Patrol, and all of those other Federal agencies that have arrest powers? Should the local Good ol' Boy sheriff be able to pull up your record in NCIC with no audit trail?