Trump’s abhorrent daily pronouncements about what he would do as president come at such a rate that we have become numb to them. We’ve lost count of the amount of times he’s claimed he’ll bring back waterboarding, or some forms of torture that are “so much worse” (something that would constitute a war crime). Or that he’ll not only kill terrorists, but members of their families as well – another war crime. (After some backlash for these statements, Trump claimed on Friday that he would still “obey the law”.)

Trump’s list of enemies could make Nixon, who saw no problem in using the NSA to spy on American dissidents and his political opponents, look tame in comparison. While one of the NSA’s mass surveillance programs was curtailed (but not eliminated) by the USA Freedom Act, there remain myriad programs that touch on vast numbers of Americans’ communications. The FBI still has carte blanche to look at NSA’s international intercepts for Americans caught up in its net, and just last week the New York Times reported that the NSA plans to remove key privacy protections from much of its surveillance data, so that it can be shared with other federal agencies without any administrative protections. Are these the types of powers we want in the hands of a Trump administration?