>Every single government official and LEO talked to about this data say that gathering and keeping the data indefinitely on 260 million plates, in order to apprehend just 136 individuals, is good practice.
>If that's your definition of common sense, I want nothing to do with it.
I would think this is a perfectly acceptable reason from the point of the NSA, or as someone who would like as much data available as possible to debug a problem. If I could log every event on every cloud instance I've ever launched negligibly this would be something I obviously would want to do as it would help tracking down issues immensely (assuming that I'm not drowning from data overload).
Debugging of your source code is not equal to a pervasive surveillance state intruding on individual privacy, unless you are to assume (incorrectly) that we are all owned by the state and have no independent rights apart from the state.
In the eyes of the law, debugging my source code and tracking every place your car drives on public roads (non intrusively without attaching a GPS device) are exactly the same: legal.
But previous articles posted to HN have had arguments by law professors that at least some of what the NSA is doing is actually illegal, even aside from questions of constitutionality.
>If that's your definition of common sense, I want nothing to do with it.
I would think this is a perfectly acceptable reason from the point of the NSA, or as someone who would like as much data available as possible to debug a problem. If I could log every event on every cloud instance I've ever launched negligibly this would be something I obviously would want to do as it would help tracking down issues immensely (assuming that I'm not drowning from data overload).