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"In a press conference just now, President Obama addressed the NSA surveillance programs, saying "we're gonna have to make some choices as a society" to examine how we deal with privacy issues and terrorism."

Right. And just how is society going to make informed choices about things they don't even know exist?

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They're saying they aren't intercepting audio recording of phone calls, but can we really trust them at this point?

And he wasn't very clear about the online communications, from what I read so far. So probably Skype calls and such are intercepted and recorded anyway.

Obama specifically said "nobody is listening to your telephone calls", which is probably technically true. There isn't a person sitting there listening to them. If it's happening, it's an automated process and they're being archived, to allow for retroactive search and playback (probably with a warrant at that point to make it more legal).

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