"Why Should I Care?"

Someone asked me what I thought about the NSA and their spy policies.  The woman I was speaking to said she didn't mind the spying because she doesn't break the law (though she torrents movies online).   All I could quote was Martin Niemöller's famous quote which he wrote in a Nazi prison camp:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out-- Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out-- Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out-- Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.

The NSA "has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world."
— The New York Times

The NSA collected "almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks" in one month in 2013.
— The Guardian

The NSA is collecting the content and metadata of emails, web activity, chats, social networks, and everything else as part of what it calls "upstream" collection.
— The Washington Post

The NSA "is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans."
 — The Washington Post

The NSA "is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world."
 — The Washington Post

The NSA "is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country." — The New York Times

WHAT CAN YOU DO?  Email your legislators:

https://thedaywefightback.org