Eighteen years ago, when my oldest child first started going on the internet, I remember telling her

[pnwmom]

and her friends that nothing they did online was private -- not their emails, which could be forwarded by anyone to anyone, or anything they did on a website. They should always act expecting that others could see everything they did -- there was no such thing as privacy online.

This was sometime after a Supreme Court decision that said that no one expects garbage on the street to have privacy, so I think I just extended the analogy in my mind. Also, it was clear very early on that employers were reserving the right to spy on their employees' online activity.

So I guess that's why I was surprised by all the uproar. I agree the issues can and should be debated, but how can anyone really be so shocked? Were people really thinking that the words they put out on the internet were theirs and theirs alone?

(Telephones are a different situation. Those are covered by wiretapping laws and if those laws are still being broken -- as they were during the Bush administration -- that is something I'd be very upset about. But the jury is still out on that.)

[HiPointDem]

1. the analogy to email is mail, not garbage on the street. and fyi, you can be arrested for

getting into someone's garbage, even if it's out on the street for pickup.

[Gravitycollapse]

3. I think the laws on garbage vary from state to state.

But, as you imply, many states do consider it illegal to rummage through garbage even if it is out for pickup.

[Hekate]

21. I suppose you are aware that ANYthing you produce on an employer's computer...

... belongs to that employer. As a matter of labor law, reinforced over and over, there is zero expectation of personal privacy if you email your girlfriend or your mom from work.

Bringing the hammer down depends entirely on the employer's good will. My sis and I had very lengthy correspondence conducted in the middle of the night from her various engineering jobs over the years. (We are in different time zones.) I, otoh, was a secretary/admin asst and likely would have been fired for similarly using my employer's time and equipment, because my work product was valued differently. Our brother, a hazmat scientist, not only could not use his work computer for any correspondence (he forbade us to write him on that account unless it was an emergency concerning our now-late mother), but discovered that his boss had remotely installed spyware on his home computer. The latter was probably illegal, but he quietly de-installed it, and looked for another job.

The point is: if the equipment belongs to your boss, so does the product of that equipment, even if you produce it on your lunch break or after hours.

I know it sucks, but the law backs up the boss.

Now, whatever you or I write at home on our own computer is our business, and private. But once we share it via email or FB or other social media, we just have to recognize that it's all leaky. Reply All and Send All are very powerful and actually we do not have control over what someone else chooses to do with it once it's out there.

[HiPointDem]

22. no, what we write at home is NOT private, and that is the point at issue. the bit about

things produced on work time belonging to the employer HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE CASE & is just a silly red herring.

no, when i send an email i am not 'sharing' with the world, i am mailing the person i sent the email to, just as i would mail a regular letter to that person.

interesting that you use that word 'share'. it's not standard usage and already indicates a particular bias.

[Hekate]

24. Are you not "sharing" your thoughts here at DU? Do you not "share" personal info on social media?

That is the sense in which I use the word "share."

As for email, when someone I know sends me spam that gets on my last nerve, I am likely to "share" my response by hitting Reply All.

Most people who have ever been on a listserve have had or witnessed the embarrassing experience of hitting Reply when they actually wanted to communicate with someone off-list, thus "sharing" their thoughts with a couple of hundred other people.

Enough sharing for you.

[HiPointDem]

27. you said email and i wrote about email. email is not 'sharing'. political forums like du are

public. if the us-stasi wants to read what i write, fine, i understand that i'm publishing in a public forum just like writing a letter to the editor or holding a public meeting, and if i'm accused of some crime i know the record of what i wrote is there semi-permanently.

but emails are not public sharing. you seem to be blurring such distinctions. and hitting 'reply all' is still an email sent to a limited number of persons, unless your 'all' list includes everyone in the us, including its intelligence agencies.

[Hekate]

50. I think the lines actually are blurred

I'm not saying I like it

[Quantess]

41. Yes, but I wasn't expecting the government to be keeping tabs on everything I do.

Such as tying in all my activity on DU to my gmail account (which DU does not even have, by the way). I registered on the DU using an email account that had no reference to my real name, which I now see was pointless.

We might as well have been using our real names and a link to facebook every time we post on the DU, as well as links showing what we just purchased, and who we just got off the phone with.

[Hekate]

51. I don't think the government is actually doing that

Face Book, on the other hand, keeps shadow accounts of things they find out about you that you didn't tell them.

And I don't have to like it to realize that is what is going on.

[HiPointDem]

54. they are, so i guess you don't actually know what's going on

[Quantess]

55. No actually, there are several sites that PRISM monitors like a hawk.

DU and freerepublic are two of them.

I would like to think that the NSA doesn't care about me (they shouldn't think I'm interesting because I'm not) but if they decided I was interesting they would have all the info right there to inspect.

[jeff47]

49. No. Physical mail is contained in an envelope, ensuring privacy.

Email is transmitted in clear text for anyone along the way to read. It's much closer to sending a postcard than a letter.

[silverweb]

2. I included phones in that a long time ago, too.

[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]Remember when cordless phones became popular and we learned that any neighbor with a walkie-talkie could eavesdrop?

We lost any expectation of privacy for our phone calls then. Cell phones carried a similar warning early on -- that anyone who knew how to hack into into them could and probably would.

People have been spying on each other forever, for reasons large and small, important and petty, for state secrets and mere gossip.

That's why I don't find any of this NSA stuff particularly surprising or shocking. No, I'm not saying it's right -- but it's not surprising. If it wasn't the NSA, it would be a snoopy neighbor or some teenaged hackers.

[pnwmom]

4. Yeah, I know that was true about phones, though I've heard that the technology

now makes simple eavesdropping a lot harder. Still, the law requires the government to get a warrant before wiretapping, and I expect them to follow the law.

OTOH, I've never heard anything that gave me an expectation of privacy online.

[HiPointDem]

7. so much bullshit, so little time.

[Skidmore]

34. And then there's reality.

How things work in the real world. It just doesn't match up with what you would like to see and then there are those pesky people who don't agree with you on every point either or interpret event and issue a little differently How easy it is to dismiss the whole realm of experience and thought beyond your own as "bullshit."

[HiPointDem]

36. bullshit apologetics

[Skidmore]

37. No one is apologizing for anything.

Last edited Thu Jun 27, 2013, 09:08 AM - Edit history (1)

Period.

Look, I'm fed up to here with some of the insistence on this board that anyone who is trying to look at as many moving parts in this huge issue and account for the presence of a whole group of facts that are conveniently ignored by those interested in creating a "hero" of Snowden (talk about cult of personality) are dismissed as apologists, authoritarians, unpatriotic, uninformed, ignorant, and what have you. We are your fellow citizens and have the ability to look at information and evaluate it on our own.

I'm a housewife in Iowa and a grandmother and have never pretended to be anything other than what I am in all of the years I've been DU regardless of what was going on in my life. I love my village, my state, and my nation. I have had many disagreements with policies and politicians over the years and worked for changes I believe are necessary for this nation. There is this almost knee jerk reaction to assume that anyone who will not totally agree your view (and there are others like you here) are somehow lacking and don't see the issues as important. Perhaps really trying to hear others and a little respect for the right of others to see things differently would assist you in trying to bring them to where you have arrived in your analysis. It will not diminish you as a person if you do this but certainly does when you don't extend to others what you ask for yourself.

It is a fact that the wild West nature of the internet has been known since its inception and talked about accordingly for sometime. A technology was rapidly established without any thought to its applications and adjusting the laws to account for its use. That is central to all of this. Everyone jumped on board for the benefits it afforded in convenience in terms of conducting business, research, and communications without taking time to have the dialogue early on. The genie is out of the bottle. Stuffing it back in is a task in futility at this point, I believe. A constructive and focused conversation and actions is needed now. However, you have a couple of decades of legal precedents and legislation in place already that must be factored in.

[riqster]

47. What an awesome post.

Thanks for writing it. Were it an OP, I'd give it a rec.

[Skidmore]

48. It needed to be said.

The hyperventilating and insulting nature of some of these posters is not constructive and, given the lack of evidence otherwise, I believe are intended to be divisive. I don't put people on ignore but note that many of this group cannot tolerate other viewpoints or voices. I've been "plonked" (how freaking adolescent can you get) by a couple. I find it obnoxious that in their insistence on transparency and full freedom, they choose to exercise censorship and intolerance.

[HiPointDem]

6. because the nsa is just like my nosy neighbor.

[Quantess]

43. No, more like a harmless nosy neighbor dog who sniffs inappropriately.

Or a person eavesdropping on loud conversations on the bus.

It's okay, everybody does it!!

No really, it's no big deal that the US government is soon opening a massive data collection center, the size of a small town, just to collect and analyze all the information it can get on everyone all over the world.

[Control-Z]

5. Other than your time line, ditto to every word you wrote.

It was about 7 years ago for me. 10 - 11 years ago, my 3 kids, in unison and horror, screamed NO when I turned their computer off with the power switch. (Obviously, I didn't know the first thing about computers. They'd had computers in their classrooms starting in the 1st grade.)

Once my oldest (with little patience for the ignorant - that would be me) taught me how to connect to the internet, it took about a minute to realize everything you've written about.

I have 2 Facebook accounts that I only use for family pictures - and checking up on my kids. And I have 2 twitter accounts I have never used. It is because of privacy issues that I don't.

I find it difficult to believe that anyone on DU would be shocked by these "new" privacy issues. Honestly, private corporations collect and sell our personal data for profit, and somehow that is ok?! I just don't get it.

[sabrina 1]

10. Shocked? Why do you think people are shocked when we were all here after the leaks that exposed

the Bush Administration spying, illegally, on the American people. We were here also when Congress 'fixed' the FISA law to make legal Bush's illegal spying along with the Telecoms. To do that, they had to make the law retroactive and they had to weaken it. There was outrage at the time, and a real sense of betrayal by they Dems who went along with allowing Bush to break the law and SAVE him from the consequences.

No, we are not shocked, we are perhaps more shocked that what we were promised didn't come to pass, 'more transparancy' etc etc, or whatever. We expect this from War Criminals like Bush. We were told, that in order to change things, we needed to vote 'straight Democrat'. We did that, twice, and here we are, worse off on these issues than ever. We have Bush guys being appointed to powerful positions by a Democrat. Director of Intel, Clapper, Bush loyalist and former CEO of Booz Allen. No conflict there, no sir!

We are NOT shocked that governments will get out of control, as it did during the Bush years, but Bush is GONE, for five years. Where are these changes we voted for? I don't support Republicans, yet we are getting them like it or not, and excuses are being made for it. Well if we are going to get these morons, these torturers like Brennen eg, why bother voting for Democrats?

Just because people aren't expressing outrage for years, every day, doesn't mean they are not outraged and when there are more leaks, yet another attempt to reign in this out of control NSA and its 'Private Security Contractors, people are going to express their outrage again and again ask 'why is this still going on'? We did what we could to stop it, we voted for Democrats!! That is what is shocking, that it is Democrats in charge this time.

[MotherPetrie]

23. Amen, sister!!!!!!

[Democracyinkind]

8. I havent seen anyone that is shocked about it...

To me, people seem upset exactly about the "it's just the way it is" mentality that you're peddling here. No one expects privacy online -still most people demand it.

This way, you get to pretend that the people who are railing against this are more naive than your children 15 years ago. Which I find kinda laughable. It seems to me that the naiveness is mostly on the other side - f.e. those that pretend that there is no way to force the gov to treat my emails like actual letters as far as privacy is concerned.

edit: "early morning typos"

[HiPointDem]

14. +1. you put your finger on what is most annoying about that post. it at once trivializes the

issue -- mass spying on a population of a type we'd expect from the kgb -- while simultaneously denigrating those concerned with it as 'children'.

[MotherPetrie]

25. Bingo!!!

[Quantess]

44. Yes, thank you. (no text)

[JoeyT]

9. No one is shocked.

I don't know why people think people are shocked. Everyone strongly suspected they were up to this long before we had any proof. We're not shocked, we're pissed off. Being pissed off doesn't require the element of surprise.

[pnwmom]

11. There have been a lot of people expressing shock. One of them was Snowden himself.

And that is pretty hard to understand. Putting aside the issue of internal surveillance -- which, if his statements are true, is disturbing -- he's expressing shock that the NSA is spying on other countries. What did he expect when he took the job? What did he think the NSA does?

[JoeyT]

13. Then Snowden is an idiot if he didn't know it was happening.

I'm not sure he was shocked that it was occurring. More likely he was shocked at the extent of it. As cynical as I am, I know I couldn't guess the extent of the secret programs. And I think I have ten years on Snowden to become bitter and jaded.

[pnwmom]

15. He was equally shocked that the NSA is spying on other countries.

Do you think that is a reasonable reaction? Do you think most people taking NSA jobs are that ignorant of what the agency does?

[JoeyT]

18. He was equally shocked

that we're spying on our allies, I think. Although that wouldn't shock me either. What would shock me would be finding out we aren't spying on our allies.

[pnwmom]

19. Since when are China and Russia our allies? They are trading partners, not allies.

Our relationship with them is tenuous at best.

[Skidmore]

35. Spot on.

[Duer 157099]

12. And yet increasingly, we are being forced to do stuff online

Apply for jobs, coordinate healthcare, contact your physician, refill prescriptions; for work, conduct work, communicate with coworkers, manage your benefits, your retirement account, etc. Some of these things are completely non-negotiable in terms of you HAVING to do them through a website, period.

It simply isn't optional anymore. Which is why we need stronger protections, now more than ever.

[pnwmom]

16. I agree -- we need much better protections. And I don't do things like banking online,

because I don't trust the protections we have now. (I know someone who works in a bank, and she only does banking online through her bank's own system -- not from her home computer.)

[Skidmore]

38. I refuse to bank on line too and for the same reason.

The only thing close to it that we have is direct deposit of my husband's paycheck every month.

[HiPointDem]

17. exactly, we are being *forced*. today i spent most of the day trying to get services for

an elderly person who is nearly blind, slow mentally and forgetful.

'he can apply on-line blah blah blah'.

i wanted to scream at them. i am just an acquaintance of his, he has no family and his few friends are all old too. what happens to old people who have no one at all? the people on the phone talk too fast and suggest you apply on line.

when non-online options are being defunded and left to wither and everyone steered to online, you have to assume that one of the reasons is so that they *can* spy on everyone, collect data, and use it to control. manipulate and coerce the population.

[okaawhatever]

20. There really is more than one issue here. Spying is a word that is used to create

outrage, but is seldom defined in the press. The "massive government spying". What is spying? With a press that earns it's money by getting people to click on their stories, the reward is greater for getting readers outraged than it is for informing them. We need to be defining what is acceptable as American citizens.
At this point, I'm less interested in finding out the details of the programs provided one isn't revealed that's illegal. I'm more interested in creating laws where we set the boundaries. Our enemies would love to force our hand and reveal how each of these programs works. I don't want to know, so much as I want to set boundaries, on our terms, and force the gov't to follow them. I am much, much more concerned with who has access. I want laws that dictate who can generate requests for information. Hint; it will never be an elected official. I want computer programs built in that will keep a log of every single inquiry made. If it says 100 phone numbers, it needs 100 warrants, and the names had better match up. I know they are doing that to some extent now, because in the inspector general's report, and follow up by the fbi, there were missing warrants during the early Bush days. I want the most important function of those programs to be a tamper proof log. I don't want anyone running those agencies who are chosen or appointed by an elected official, nor do I want them to be hired or fired as a result of any action the elected official takes. With the internet data that is compiled from overseas, it doesn't bother me that we have a huge computer program to filter data. A computer is apolitical. What I do want is for the filter settings to be approved by a court. If they seek the terms fertilizer, Pakistan, and yellow taxi because they got a tip a Pakistani taxi driver is making bombs that makes sense. Explain it to a judge.
Lastly, I want recorded destruction of data after a certain amount of time. I want it done by gov't employees who work outside the influence of any intelligence agency. Who work strictly for the people, who have laws created with the harshest of penalties for failing to do so, and who have carte blanche to report anything they find that is wrong.
I also want world peace and rainbows, but i'll settle for everything else I typed first. Oh, and I want the corporations to stop spying on us too. That must be part of the any reform.

[pnwmom]

28. I wish you were sitting with whoever will be drafting any new laws.

Thanks for a great post.

[geckosfeet]

26. And it has gotten worse by orders of magnitude.

[Live and Learn]

29. Warning your kids is smart.

Accepting the loss of privacy and undermining those that attempt to do something about it is another thing.

The information that has been reported regarding Snowden alone is proof of how dangerous the collection and retention of data is. Any illusion of privacy should have been eliminated by anyone paying attention.

Anything you ever do will be retained until they find a need to use it against you. It wasn't always like this. Thankfully, those of us from previous generations were allowed to spout off and even get caught in misdemeanor legal situations without it haunting us for life.

Even serious crimes had a statute of limitations and even if you were convicted your crime wasn't known worldwide,. Meaning, you really had a chance after release to start a new life.

Times have changed and those of you participating in the character assassinations of people for past doings are simply giving proof to the real need to prevent our privacy.

Do any of you really think you have never done something that couldn't be found and at the very least touted online (if not used against you in a court of law) with the surveillance going on? How about the possibility of blackmailing you?

Our misdeeds may not have been recorded in the past but our children's surely will be,. And they will make mistakes just as we did.

Unfortunately, unless we do something about it theirs will be stored for eternity.

[pnwmom]

30. "those of you participating in character assassinations of people for past doings"?

I'm only interested in what Snowden is doing now. And I wish he had stopped at the revelations involving US internal surveillance -- and not crossed the line into threatening to expose our "assets" working around the world in dangerous situations.

[Live and Learn]

32. And I am very curious to know what those "assets" are.

Since it seems the NSA is so determined to get this guy for revelations that , so far at least, they have already acknowledged to date. Could it be even worse than what they have acknowledged? I think the answer must be, "yes".

But you seem to prefer the "ignorance is bliss" meme.

[pnwmom]

39. Valerie Plame was an "asset" and so is every spy and every connection out there.

Do you think she should have been outed? Is your curiosity a good reason to out all the agents he claims he can identify around the world? Don't you care that if Snowden outs assets, their lives and the lives of everybody who works with them could be at risk?

[Live and Learn]

56. Wasn't it Cheney that outed Plame?

And he wasn't punished, was he? Who has Snowden outed? And why should his punishment be any harsher than Cheneys? I believe Plame herself came out in support of Snowden.

[pnwmom]

57. It wasn't Cheney directly, but it was someone who clearly did it based on

either Cheney's or Bush's authority. Unlike Snowden, who took this all upon himself. Still, I was angry that nothing happened to whoever did the leaking. Of course that was a terrible thing.

But to answer your question, if you murder one person, should you have the same punishment as if you murdered a hundred people?

Snowden is claiming he has lists of all NSA assets around the world -- a huge number of NSA people plus their foreign connections. And he's claiming that he's going to hand over these lists to the foreign press for them to decide whether to release them or not. So, no, as bad as the Plame case was, this isn't comparable. In that case, one agent and her network was damaged. Snowden's threatening to out our entire network around the world.

No comparison. I just hope Snowden's lying through his teeth and doesn't have the documents he claims to have.

[Live and Learn]

58. Do you have links to his claims to out agents?

I haven't seen anything about him threatening to do so.

What do you mean by outing a network? Are you saying outing a network is worse than outing agents?

I really don't understand your outrage at Snowden over Cheney. In my opinion, what Cheney did was much worse and based only on his revenge at Wilson. You can't get much worse than outing an agent because she is the wife of someone that told the truth and made you look like an idiot. Not only did Cheney do that but he lied us in to a war that killed thousands. The damage he did to the country and our reputation is immeasurable. Traitor, is too kind of a word for him.

[pnwmom]

59. A network IS a network of agents, plus their foreign associates.A network is made up of human beings

that are working out there, at some risk, at the jobs we sent them to do.

Again, whoever outed Valerie Plame outed one person and her network. Not huge numbers of agents and their contacts around the world.

[Live and Learn]

60. I take it you don't have a link?

When did he ever threaten to expose agents?

And Cheney exposed many more agents by exposing the program.

[pnwmom]

61. I didn't have links at my fingertips, but here are some.

http://americablog.com/2013/06/snowden-plans-more-leaks-about-us-spying-abroad-will-let-local-press-decide-whether-to-publish.html

“If I have time to go through this information, I would like to make it available to journalists in each country to make their own assessment, independent of my bias, as to whether or not the knowledge of US network operations against their people should be published.”

Note that Snowden is now admitting a few things. First, that that he plans on releasing the details of US intelligence efforts against far more countries. Who’s next? Exposing US efforts against Iran, against Cuba, against North Korea? Against Syria?

But it gets worse. In that quote above, Snowden appears to be suggesting that the delay in releasing more documents has not been because he’s worried about compromising US national security – but rather, that he wants to make sure the right documents get to the right countries, meaning the only delay is due to him having to go through the documents and make sure that country X gets country X’s documents, and country Y gets country Y’s.

After he sorts through the documents, Edward Snowden says he will let journalists in those countries decide whether it’s safe and appropriate to print the classified documents he took from American intelligence, and whether the information he’s released poses a danger to our country. He wouldn’t want to let his “bias” as a former NSA employee, someone who actually understands the damage these documents can pose to American lives, interfere with the determination of the damage these documents might pose to American lives. He’d rather let non-experts, foreign experts, decide if information they don’t fully understand puts American lives at risk.

http://www.businessinsider.com/edward-snowden-nsa-leak-booz-allen-hamilton-2013-6

"I had full access to the full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community, and undercover assets all around the world," Snowden said.

_________________________________



And here is a good general article about why we spy at all – which, given today’s world, means we spy with computers. You might know all this already, but a lot of DUers don’t seem to.

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/eichenwald/2013/06/errors-edward-snowden-global-hypocrisy-tour

Take the actions involving Tsinghua University. There are many reasons the N.S.A. would be interested in communications and computer activities at this Beijing-based school. For example, beginning in the past decade or so, university programs on arms control have played an important role in the Chinese government’s efforts to administer export controls on sensitive items. (For those wishing to know more, this is well detailed in a book published by the Rand Corporation called Chasing the Dragon: Assessing China’s System of Export Controls for WMD-Related Goods and Technologies.) Now, perhaps the most prominent university program in China on arms control is at—you guessed it—Tsinghua University. So, do you think there might be a reason why the N.S.A. would want to know about any communications on arms control that might take place between the Chinese government and Tsinghua?
The importance of China in global arms-control issues is hard to understate, even in American negotiations with Russia over proposals on nuclear-arms reduction. As Richard Weitz, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Political-Military Affairs at Hudson Institute, wrote last year:
China’s continued absence from strategic nuclear arms control negotiations is already impeding U.S.-Russian progress in this area. Beijing has traditionally resisted participating in formal nuclear arms control agreements. . . . Whereas U.S. officials want the next major nuclear arms reduction agreement to include only Russia and the United States, Russian negotiators want China and other nuclear weapons states to participate. In particular, Russian representatives insist they cannot reduce their major holdings of nonstrategic, or tactical, nuclear weapons without considering China’s growing military potential. Involving China in certain U.S.-Russian arms control processes could facilitate progress between Moscow and Washington in these areas and yield ancillary benefits for related issues.
Is this the reason for the N.S.A.’s activities at Tsinghua? My intel friend held it out as a good, educated guess, but then made a broader point. Contrary to the depictions in movies, the N.S.A. does not engage in foreign surveillance as part of some James Bond–ian plot to take over the world. Decisions are based on the national-security needs of the United States. Actions at Tsinghua are not arbitrary; there is a national-security reason they are being done, whether about arms-control policies in China, something else altogether, or both.
SNIP
And, what apparently shocks Snowden but what any fool has known for years, the advent of fiber-optic technology has required the N.S.A. and other allied intelligence services to get into the business of cable-tapping. They had the choice: either tap cables or, in some fit of childish, Snowden-like horror at the demands of international security operations, surrender access to intelligence that the West has depended on for decades.

[Live and Learn]

62. Nowhere in that does he threaten to expose names of agents

and he hasn't that anyone knows of. In fact, it has been alleged, even on du, that he exaggerated his knowledge and didn't have access to names.

All the information he has passed on so far was really common knowledge by anyone paying attention.

[pnwmom]

63. I said earlier that I hoped he'd been lying about having access to the full roster

of all agents. But if he did there's no reason to assume they're NOT among the thousands of documents Greenwald says Snowden stole.

And it isn't true that "all the information he has passed on so far was really common knowledge." That was true about the US surveillance, about the collection of telephone metadata, and the fact that, yes, we do spy on people outside the US.

But the DETAILS about foreign spying were not common knowledge. And the locations of our taps on the fiberoptic cables in the oceans (as shown in one of the powerpoint slides) were not common knowledge. And he's claiming, in the link I just gave you, that he's going to be passing on more specific information on our spying in foreign countries.

[corkhead]

31. I was entitled to my irrational paranoia about on-line privacy and they took that away from me

I was able to dismiss those feelings as being my overactive imagination, but they have been confirmed as reality

[bemildred]

33. The problem is the wretched excess, everybody knows, but this is stupid and obsessive.

It is in fact none of our business what everybody in the world is doing, and we ought to know it and mind our own business.

And then to have our own "Top Secret" cleared guy "exposing" us while hiding in the Moscow airport ...

And you wonder why Putin is in no hurry to end this?

[pnwmom]

40. We have not been going after everyone in the world. We have been tracking terrorists,

primarily al Queda, who live in various countries .

[HiPointDem]

42. more bullshit

[bemildred]

46. Nobody is going to buy that, even it if is true.

And you can't open it up to prove it because its all "classified".

[The Straight Story]

45. Meh, not shocked that OUR money by the billions goes towards collecting data on us citizens

I have, for a long time, seen our government as corrupt and power hungry.

Not to mention, at times, downright stupid.

What I AM shocked about is that we pay over $40 million a year in electricity alone to store this data and who knows how much else for personnel, systems, etc all in the name of keeping us more safe from each other.

Every time you go to work, get a paycheck, look at it and think about the fact that part of your life was used to generate the money for the government to read what you wrote on the web and in your personal emails.

[Buzz Clik]

52. Totally agree, pnwmom.

My assumption is that every email I write, every DU post I make, are subject to scrutiny.

[reformist2]

53. It's good that people are shocked - better late than never.

One could argue that Snowden has done a service merely by making the last 30% or so of the public aware of what is really going on.

[Bluenorthwest]

64. Strange OP. So if it is not brand new it can not be bad? How can anyone be shocked at a

shooting? Millions of them have happened. And yet a murder happens and people are upset, some claim to be shocked. Should they not be shocked? Does the common nature of a crime make it less of crime, OP? Is that your contention?