I know.  I should care.  Governmental abuse and all that.  But I don’t.

This past week has been filled with stories about the sunset clauses of The Patriot Act, and overwhelming surveillance methods regarding our phone usage.  And I can’t quite give a damn.

I like what Edward Snowden did, for the most part.  I think he should be granted a pardon.  It is good that we are having these conversations.  And I do worry about Fourth Amendment violations.

But if the national security apparatus is logging mine and everybody’s phone conversations — specifically, the time and place of my calls, who I called, and how long we talked — and all that information is stored in some gigantic hard drive in Utah…. well, big deal.  Basically, they’ve got my phone bill, right?  I mean, do I have an expectation of privacy with regard to that?  Not really.  And it’s not like a pair of human eyes looks at it.  It’s only when a court says, “okay, a pair of human eyes can dig up that stored information off of the hard drive” that it even becomes arguably intrusive.  And even then, I don’t care.

And we’re told that there are these supercomputers that actually listen in (without a warrant) to hundreds of thousands of phone conversations trying to pinpoint certain words and phrases like “al Quaeda” and “bomb”, and flagging them.  Again, do I care?  Not really.  I worry about abuse (and Snowden said there was a lot of that — i.e., NSA agents listening in on ex-wives, celebrities, etc.), but that is going outside the law.  I have no problem with the law as practiced.  I don’t feel my privacy is being invaded if a non-sentient computer listens in to my phone calls.  I just don’t.

And even this doesn’t bother me:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Scores of low-flying planes circling American cities are part of a civilian air force operated by the FBI and obscured behind fictitious companies, The Associated Press has learned.

The AP traced at least 50 aircraft back to the FBI, and identified more than 100 flights in 11 states over a 30-day period since late April, orbiting both major cities and rural areas. At least 115 planes, including 90 Cessna aircraft, were mentioned in a federal budget document from 2009.

For decades, the planes have provided support to FBI surveillance operations on the ground. But now the aircraft are equipped with high-tech cameras, and in rare circumstances, technology capable of tracking thousands of cellphones, raising questions about how these surveillance flights affect Americans’ privacy.

“It’s important that federal law enforcement personnel have the tools they need to find and catch criminals,” said Charles Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “But whenever an operation may also monitor the activities of Americans who are not the intended target, we must make darn sure that safeguards are in place to protect the civil liberties of innocent Americans.”

The FBI says the planes are not equipped or used for bulk collection activities or mass surveillance. The surveillance equipment is used for ongoing investigations, the FBI says, generally without a judge’s approval.

I guess some people might be surprised.  I’m not.  And it’s not like I’m saying, “I don’t care because I’m not guilty of doing anything wrong”; it is just that I don’t have an expectation of privacy with regard to things that I do that are visible from an airplane.  Let ’em fly.