Actually, it’s closer to that than to what you’re thinking of. Go to Crooked Timber, and read ‘Using Metadata to find Paul Revere’ (http://crookedtimber.org/2013/06/10/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/)

And that’s literally Linear Algebra 101. That’s what could be taught in the first week of social networking analysis. Imagine what the current status of data mining is, and then imagine what an agency such as the NSA could have, which has been long known to have some pretty major tech/science advantages.

Then add to it the fact that they don’t need to make a profit or have positive ROI. They can have a very high false positive rate, and that’s not a problem.

In the Enlightenment tradition of contextless rationalism the answer is basically ‘none’, because life is in principle perfectible and therefore any imperfection is morally intolerable. Isn’t this where the rape culture / gun culture / surveillance culture move comes from? Isn’t it self-defeating? If every moment of every life needs to be free of risk, then of course we need a massive panoptical apparatus of control. Of course we need security cameras on the doors of the Intercultural Center. Of course you need some kind of neo-colonial protection from the ordinary microaggression of your foreignness in Zimbabwe. Of course rolling into an inherently imperfect new orientation toward privacy, as you suggest for the justice system at Swarthmore, is an expedient violation of moral rigor.

Well that’s obviously silly. So given that there’s going to be risk, there also has to be trust. Without trust, life is nothing but an endless anxiety of powerlessness with respect to forces we can’t possibly control; or, as you say, the awful fantasy of total control. On this view the ‘culture’ move is inherently panopticizing. It turns a statistical possibility into an existential mandate. I’m no more interested in a regime of rigorous oversight of my elected representatives than I’m interested in rigorous oversight of my garbage collector or cameras in the campus hallways or mandatory sidearms for faculty and staff; or poking into every closet looking for contraband Glocks, for that matter. And that means things are going to go wrong sometimes, and we’ll inherently have to fix them after the fact, and/or accept some ‘spoilage’ as a consequence of an unregimented life.

What I’m arguing is that a degree of trust and risk-tolerance is the escape hatch from the mirror trap of hubris and fatalism. Of course we could also get religion; that’s been known to work.

This forbiddance in the Constitution was added after the original ratification, and, as you have pointed out, it has been ignored ever since. When the People, as the myth goes, after careful consideration, delegate all of their power to a small group of elected officials, they are powerless and their delegates are free to do pretty much as they please for years. This was deliberate. It was done to protect the economic interests of the elites who wrote and ratified the Constitution.

Charles A. Beard got it right about a century ago when he published, “An Economic Interpretation of the American Constitution.” At the time, other historians agreed, and he views were ascendant. But about fifty years later, when I was a student in a class on the Constitution, the lecturer let us know that Beard’s views were controversial and even radical.

But my point is already made. You are complaining about the fact that the Constitution is not working the way you believe it is designed to work. I say it is working the way it was designed. It does work the way I say, or you would not be complaining. So, who is right?

But I agree with you that the way it is working is wrong. But what should it be changed to? How should the changes be made? Who should do it? When should they start? How long will it take? Who will resist the effort to make changes? How will their resistance be overcome?

The worst part of all of this is that all the hysterics about the surveillance being “beyond Orwellian” (whatever that means) plays right into the hands of the technocrats, who can smugly sit back in their chairs and say “well of course we could have this amount of power. That’s the goal! But we’ll use it for *good* of course”

I believe that in practice we *do* need to assume that the existing powers will be badly abused. But even if they weren’t being, what you describe here is radically worse than whatever domestic abuses of the federal government may have already occurred.