'No Place to Hide' from NSA, Then or Now | Cato Institute

'No Place to Hide' from NSA, Then or Now | Cato Institute: "In one case, for example, “on the subject’s first day of access to the SIGINT system, he queried six email addresses belonging to a former girlfriend, a U.S. person.” He got a demotion and two months’ reduced pay.

In 2008, a former Navy intercept operator stationed at a NSA facility described how his colleagues used to pass around highlights of soldiers’ phone calls home from Iraq.

The word would go out that “there’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny.”

LOVEINT abuses are comparatively small-time, but they hint at the dangers endemic to our burgeoning Surveillance State: Information is power; the modern NSA’s capabilities are indescribably powerful and power corrupts."

Bankrupt Ideas Lead to Bankrupt Governments | Cato Institute

Bankrupt Ideas Lead to Bankrupt Governments | Cato Institute: "During the second Clinton administration, federal spending was about 20 percent lower as a percentage of GDP than it is now. Yet I do not recall starvation among the American people, nor the acutely ill being thrown out of hospitals because they could not pay, nor children not finding schools to attend. It did not happen, nor did it happen from the end of the Civil War until World War I, when federal spending was only about 3 percent of GDP, in contrast to today’s 22 percent."

"Mrs. Pelosi may think there is nothing more to cut, but her own government continues to find huge waste. Medicare fraud and abuse alone now costs more than $115 billion per year, and even though the problem is well known, it persists decade after decade, as Mrs. Pelosi and her colleagues do nothing to stop it. But then, again, it is not their money that is wasted. According to the Congressional Research Service, the U.S. government has 77,000 unused or underused buildings that cost taxpayers $1.67 billion annually to operate and maintain."