I can't tell if he's being serious..<p>> "It's great," Ellison said of the domestic spying. "It's great, it's essential. President Obama thinks it's essential. It's essential if we want to minimize the kind of strikes that we just had in Boston. It's absolutely essential."<p>Except our government, despite all the warnings about the Boston bombers, were unable to stop them. They're clearly incompetent. And Ellison is just accepting that it's essential based on.. faith?<p>> If some people don't like what NSA is doing, Ellison argued, the trick is to vote the spying programs away. "The great thing is that we live in a democracy. If we don't like what NSA is doing, we can just get rid of the government and put in a different government," he said.<p>Except these are secret laws being deemed secretly constitutional by a secret court. How can we vote the programs away if everything related to them is secret?<p>> But even if we dismantled the NSA, Ellison warned, that wouldn't mean nobody would be collecting the kinds of data the NSA gathers. American Express, Visa, and other financial services companies have all been building detailed profiles on their customers since long before the issue of government surveillance ever came up, he said – so why shouldn't the government have the same tools?<p>Uh.. why should they? Two wrongs don't make a right.<p>> "This whole issue of privacy is utterly fascinating to me," Ellison said. "Who's ever heard of this information being misused by the government? In what way?"<p>Didn't he just answer this himself..?<p>> Pressed to say where he would draw the line on domestic surveillance, he ventured that it would be wrong if the data were used for political ends