> It wasn't even questionably legal for 4 years where it was publicly known to be illegal let alone the length of time before that while it was operating in secret.
Smith v. Maryland makes it constitutional. Whether it was authorized by the PATRIOT Act was not clear, but their lawyers provided justification.
> I can guarantee you that 1 in 400 of our projects by budget at my work aren't ilegal or could even have questions raised about their legality.
Snowden could see the documents describing all the programs, but there was only one program that was questionably legal in there.
> And if it turned out I was wrong and people where purposefully commiting crimes against my fellow countrymen I'd be cheering the whistleblower who brought it to light while looking for a different job that wasn't such a cesspit of moral compromise.
What if the "whistleblower" also released the documents for all the other programs that were clearly legal? I guarantee you if the SharePoint admin at your company released all the internal documents, there would be at least one crime in there. Does that make it right for all SharePoint admins at every large company to always publicly release all the documents on their servers? I certainly wouldn't cheer them at my company, especially if they released documents helping competitors, like a list of compromised Chinese networks and when they were compromised.
> The silliest part
is that what North Korea is doing would be clearly illegal in the US, but pueblito claims that the NSA is doing worse without any evidence and with the evidence from Snowden's leaks showing that the NSA at least tries very hard to follow the law.