The moral of the following retail pricing story is that it's profoundly difficult to assess the value of any product in a vacuum. Subjectively evaluating government acts presents the same difficulties as evaluating products; in both cases display makes all the difference in the world.

For the story, imagine you're a plastic surgeon in Los Angeles, and you want to buy your wife a fur coat this Christmas.

To be expedient, you visit Hunky Dory Coat Factory on Rodeo Drive. A delightful antique display and friendly faces greet you upon entry. Decorative plants, backlit with colorful lights, are beautifully positioned next to a grandiose marble checkout desk. You make your way forward and an unobtrusive attendant smiles kindly in your direction. Dark mahogany wooden floors span the interior, glimmering in the light as you see the coat you came for. As you inch closer, you know it's the one, but you can't help noticing every coat at Hunky Dory costs over $5,000. You pick up your wife's desired coat despite much apprehension. You go straight for the price tag, slowly turn it over, and incredibly, it's only $1000. "What a tremendous deal," you think to yourself.

Now take a look at what happens if we repeat the above at Dilapidated Coat Factory.

Dilapidated Coats is located in a crummy old warehouse with high ceilings and noisy industrial fans. The coats hang from a dusty rack on the opposite wall with no organization. The floors are unfinished concrete and the walls are chipping paint. As you move closer, you notice that most coats on the rack cost under $50. But to your surprise, you come across the perfect fur coat for your wife. You inspect the price tag, and you're shocked to find it's $1000. You leave disgusted.

The point is, when the product's environment changes, the price you expect to pay changes too. Perceived value is driven by environmental factors. Display makes all the difference.

It follows that how you perceive isolated US government actions greatly depends on whether you favor the state of America's economic and political affairs. Just like Hunky Dory's extravagant display made a $1,000 coat look like a deal next to $5,000 coats, if you think America is truly incapable of repeating history, you may think all American laws are passed in good faith, or rationalize all government efforts away as positive.

Surveillance, being a precursor to force, is at least worthy of extra scrutiny.

First and foremost, the U.S. Constitution was expressly designed to limit government power. By this logic, in order for the US Government to make good faith interpretations to the Constitution, legislative measures must err on the side of limiting government power, surveillance measures included. Under no circumstances should any new measure conceivably facilitate tyranny, nor should the measure employ clever word games to enable such a scenario.

If you can entertain the notion that the American government has been corrupted by money and outside influence, and that the US Dollar isn't infallible, you may start to consider the possibility of a scenario where surveillance measures like this one are used to restrict freedoms, and increase government power during stressful times in order to perpetuate failed systems. Therefore it matters greatly whether the political and economic environment looks Dilapidated to you. You're free to think it's Hunky Dory. That is your choice.

Assuming the US government is acting in its own interest, even if it were OK to monitor international communications for increased security, it doesn't compel the government to codify rules into law with hedge words like "intentionally". To think, the subversion of your Constitutional rights now hinges upon whether surveillance qualifies as "intentional" according to a legal scholar's interpretation. The use of the word "intentional" here shares the same audacity as the NSA's classifying of American communications as "intercepted" vs. "stored". Either way the NSA gets to summon your records on demand, so who cares whether it's technically "intercepted". Just the same, who cares whether surveillance is intentional or not? This bill appears in effect legalizes dragnet surveillance over the American populace. According to William Binney, surveillance is already done dragnet style across the entire US populace, so it's not like they're ever going to "Intentionally" surveil most American citizens anyway. They do it by default, they do it today, but now they get to point at this word "Intentionally", and claim state secrets privileges while strong-arming the populace out of their Constitutional rights.

I urge you to watch billionaire investor Dr. Michael J. Burry's commencement address at the 2012 UCLA Department of Economics [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CLhqjOzoyE