Follow the Bouncing Ball

The Hill has a piece on the NSA issue which states:

“It’s just the irony of this whole debate,” said Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a prominent defender of the NSA.

“I mean it’s unbelievable what private companies collect from individuals and how they track them and track what their shopping habits are and where they may or may not be and how they shop,” he said. “All of that is collected. The NSA doesn’t do anything like that at all.”

Now let us examine the logic a bit. A consumer buys something from Amazon. The chose to freely give Amazon information as part of the transaction. A user goes to Google for a search. There is a tacit agreement that they give Google the search info in return for performing the search. In either case the consumer can withhold the information by not buying from Amazon or not going to Google. The NSA data collection has no such agreement on the part of the consumer nor did the consumer even have an inkling. In addition the NSA search is a Government search. The Amazon is private. The Amazon search is part of any transaction. The NSA search is not, in fact there is a Constitutional issue which protects us from intrusion by the Government, not by private companies.

Thus is there a difference? The answer is year, and not the type as indicated in the quote above. Logic and facts seems to be clouded in this debate, a debate perhaps we should not even be having.