{"id":22239,"date":"2013-10-31T05:56:20","date_gmt":"2013-10-31T13:56:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=22239"},"modified":"2013-10-31T05:56:20","modified_gmt":"2013-10-31T13:56:20","slug":"in-2013-you-paid-574-to-the-nsa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2013\/10\/31\/in-2013-you-paid-574-to-the-nsa\/","title":{"rendered":"In 2013, You Paid $574 to the NSA"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"NSA

NSA Headquarters, Fort Meade, MD<\/p><\/div>\n

Imagine being beaten to a pulp by a mafia hit-man. Your nose is broken and dribbling blood, your left eye is swollen shut, you may have broken ribs. Somehow, you manage to stand up. Just then, the hit-man produces an invoice for his services to the tune of $574.<\/p>\n

The only thing worse than being violently assaulted is being forced to pay for your own abuser’s time and effort.<\/p>\n

That’s what the NSA is like. According to a Cato blog post<\/a> by Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University, every American taxpayer is billed $574 per year to keep the NSA up and running.<\/p>\n

For months, the American public has received\u00a0a steady stream<\/a>\u00a0of new information detailing the massive scale and scope of the United States\u2019 spying activities. Of course, maintaining a surveillance state powerful enough to\u00a0reach into the inboxes<\/a>\u00a0of world leaders,\u00a0friend and foe<\/a>, is not cheap. Indeed,\u00a0as the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0revealed<\/a>\u00a0when it released portions of the so-called Black Budget, this year\u2019s price tag on America\u2019s spook infrastructure comes out to a whopping $52.6 billion.<\/p>\n

This is, of course, a tremendous sum \u2013 more than double the size of the Department of Agriculture, more than triple the size of NASA;\u00a0the list<\/a>\u00a0goes on\u2026 But, what really puts this number into perspective is its average cost to each American taxpayer, or what I would call the NSA and associated agencies\u2019 \u201crent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yes, the NSA\u2019s rent, charged to\u00a0every taxpayer<\/a>\u00a0living under its web of surveillance, comes out to an exorbitant $574 per year. If this is the price the federal government is charging American taxpayers to have their own privacy invaded, then I say the NSA\u2019s rent is too damn high.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The NSA is collecting every American’s daily telephone metadata in bulk. It’s surveilling our emails, IM chats, video conferences. It’s systematically violating both statutory and constitutional laws meant to protect Americans’ privacy and individual rights. Even\u00a0Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, the author of the authoritarian PATRIOT ACT, believes NSA activity\u00a0“threatens our First, Second and Fourth Amendment rights.”<\/p>\n

For all this, Americans get a bill. We pay for our own abuse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Imagine being beaten to a pulp by a mafia hit-man. Your nose is broken and dribbling blood, your left eye is swollen shut, you may have broken ribs. Somehow, you manage to stand up. Just then, the hit-man produces an invoice for his services to the tune of $574. The only thing worse than being […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-22239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22239"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22240,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22239\/revisions\/22240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22239"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=22239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}