If you have reasonable evidence, wiretapping a suspect to gain more evidence is fine. On the other hand wiretapping everyone in hope of finding some initial evidence, that is not okay at all.
But that's just a restatement of the OP's position ("Mass surveillance is never an appropriate solution"). You're not attempting to justify that position.
That's just an axiom for me, no justification needed. My life is my life and it is not the business of the state to watch every step I do as long as I am not affecting others in any relevant way. You convince me that I or society as a whole would be better off if I allowed the state to constantly keep an eye on me, then I might change my opinion and grant the state the permission to violate my privacy.
That's nonsense, every worldview must be grounded in some axioms, that does not make it a religion. I can break it down somewhat more for you. The state has no powers besides the ones granted by its citizens. I value my privacy highly and need very good reasons to grant the state permission to violate it. Catching criminals does not clear the bar, there are other ways to do this that do not violate my privacy.
If you want to get it amended, then by all means, make a case for why it should be amended.
In the meantime you wanted to know why mass surveillance isn’t an option. The answer “because it’s against the law” is a simple, good answer.
If you want to know why we decided as a nation to make that such a fundamental law that it is in our constitution, you could do worse than reading about what prompted the writing of the Bill of Rights.
The answer “because it’s against the law” is a simple, good answer.
While often true, at all times there have also been morally wrong laws, so it would not be unreasonable to counter that being written into law on itself means nothing. So you should always be prepared to pull out and defend the reasoning behind a law, which you also hinted at in your following sentences.
Why is it not okay at all? That's what our intelligence agencies do with their bulk data collection capabilities, and they have an immense positive impact on society.
If you want to argue that they can scan people outside the country and not US citizens, and that that has a benefit, go ahead and make that argument. You might even convince me.
But it’s just begging the question to say there’s immense benefit to them searching US citizens’ communications without a reason.
That’s the whole question.
Show me why we should change the constitution which guarantees us freedom from this sort of government oppression.
I'm writing from a UK perspective so there's no underlying constitutional issue here like there might be in the US. Bulk data collection is restricted by specific laws and this mandates regular operational oversight by an independent body, to ensure that both the collection and each individual use of the data is necessary and proportionate.
Some of this will include data of British citizens, but the thing is, we have a significant home-grown terrorism problem and serious organised criminal gang activity, happening within the country. If intelligence analysts need to look at, for example, which phone number contacted which other phone number on a specific date in the recent past, there's no other way to do this other than bulk collect all phone call metadata from the various telecom operators, and store it ready for searching.
The vast majority of that data will never be seen by human eyes, only indexed and searched by automated systems. All my phone calls and internet activity will be in there somewhere, I'm sure, but I don't consider that in itself to be government oppression. Only if it's used for oppressive purposes, would it become oppressive.
