IRS, NSA, and the Stasi

The recent revelations about the IRS targeting groups that do not agree with the politics of the Obama Administration was bad enough. Now we learn that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been targeting all telephone records and internet usage metadata above and beyond what the Patriot Act was intended. To me this is a bit reminiscent of the old East German Stasi, a secret police network that relied on almost everyone spying on everyone else. Not even the mail was safe. Possibly the best film on the Stasi and their methods was Das Leben der Anderen aka The Lives of Others. It is an excellent film from 2006. It shows very realistically the intrusion of government into the personal lives of its citizens. Their thoughts and activities are monitored. Is this what we want in this country? I should hope not. The NSA has a specific charge to collect intelligence from our enemies. Much as the CIA it has, or should have, ZERO domestic surveillance activity. The IRS also needs to be monitored and procedures put into place so that all applications for anything are to be processed within 30 days. Only on rare exceptions should an application take longer than 30 days to be acted upon. I believe strongly that if there are not enough employees to do the job then managers and even executives should roll up their sleeves and assist. Cancel meetings. Eliminate layers of management. Just think of the savings of tax dollars if the federal bureaucracy eliminated even one third of its management. That is a possible theme of another blog. Back to my point. We do not need a stasi (a collection of secretive government intelligence agencies) snooping on what we do on the internet, who we email, and with whom we communicate with on the phone. Hopefully Senator Rand Paul's idea of a class action suit against the NSA and Obama Administration will take root and the Supreme Court will eventually decide that the NSA has exceeded its bounds and order the illegally obtained records to be destroyed.