“The NSA program poses the most difficult questions about privacy, intelligence and the law. The first essential task is to strip away some of the legal misinformation, starting with constitutional issues. The Supreme Court for decades has accorded a lesser privacy right to calling-record data — which the NSA likes to call “meta-data” — than to the underlying content. The court held in a 1979 case, Smith v. Maryland , that “it is too much to believe” that telephone users expect the numbers they dial will be secret, when those numbers appear in bills, phone logs and other business records.

Though Congress in the 1980s legislated greater privacy rights for calling data than the court had found in the Constitution, it narrowed those rights in amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allowed FISA warrants for searching call records if the information was “relevant to an ongoing investigation” of terrorism. Details about the numbers being examined had to be provided only “if known.”"

Cheap Bangladeshi labour contributed significantly to building the nice highways in WB and the metro in Kolkata.

Also, Indians or others have no moral high ground to claim on how we treat Bangladeshi immigrants / cheap labor.

I live in the mortal fear of potential financial fraud being committed on my colleagues. I check logs on my company’s servers at least twice a day because they hold enough data for someone to do what I fear.

In India, if someone manages to make an unauthorized financial transaction by credit card or cheque, the victim goes through torture. S/he has to file a court case, deal with bureaucracy, pay a hefty lawyer fee and just hope that everything works out. More often than not, the victim chooses to change a bank account number/credit card and swallow the loss in order to avoid the hassle of reclamation.

Contrast the above to what happens to an US resident who experiences credit card/other financial fraud. All the victim has to do is to call the financial institution s/he deals with, and they refund the disputed amount immediately; it is then up to the the merchant/beneficiary of the transaction to prove its authenticity. This is possible not because of the generosity of American/International financial institutions, but because US law protects its residents and has dictated to American/International financial institutions to protect US residents the way the US government sees fit. It is indeed funny that India has a reputation of having “too much state intervention” to provide a free market, what is state control if it does not protect its people?!

I really do not care if a pervert sees personal information or communication, all I care about is accountability; The US government provides this, regardless of the party in government.

There is no real privacy from the government in the US, common people in large cities are taped [on an average] eight times a day. You are taped when you make a retail purchase, use an ATM or even when you use public transport. All of these records are available to the US government on [their] demand. Unless you are doing something objectionable [according to US law], I really do not see a problem with this. India offers an interesting contrast, it is easily possible to live a law abiding life in a large city (like Mumbai), pay your taxes and social dues and be totally unnoticed by the government. Living this way is not wrong, but what if you were doing something “wrong”?

Okay, I still think that I am on the topic of your topic. Indians in West Bengal and NE states exploit “illegal immigrants” from Bangladesh in a way that is far more reprehensible than the way the US of A exploit the Mexicans and other South Americans. I do not want to go into the details of the abuse, but this blog’s American readers can look at labour costs for Bangladeshis working in Kolkata (it is less than $ 0.05/hour, Banglas also put up with rape and physical abuse, but what the hell).

I [being a non-US citizen/resident, and also an interested observer] cannot grasp the US idea of “illegal immigration” from the south of the US border. When the white man talks about the South Americans, all I can think about is that the white man deserves credit for the worst genocide in history and comes in pretty close for the most successful territorial occupation!

That was their land. They walked free and unfettered, they were free until you told them that they were not.