Where does this arbitrary 1 hour deadline come from?
> "How are you going to communicate to your cousin where to look for the message and how to break it down?"
In person, long before it's needed. Even better, if cousin A isn't reachable for some reason, cousins B, C, D, E and F are perfectly fine substitutes.
> "is it more likely that the 4+ million security clearance holders are in on some large conspiracy to take away our freedoms"
No conspiracy needed, just everybody looking out for themselves within the framework of rationalizations they bought into. And when it comes to that, 4 million are nothing. Even 4 billion are nothing.
"The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist." -- Erich Fromm
Were tens of millions of Germans really involved in a conspiracy to industrially murder millions? Of course. They just weren't aware of it. All their individual little steps and reactions were somewhat rational, the bigger picture decidedly wasn't. Do you really honestly believe worse things than this haven't happened to more and better people than 4 million NSA peeps? Such hybris in itself is a ticking bomb.
> "Having worked in every facet of the NSA as a linguist/intelligence analyst/programmer/many other things, and CIA contractor for a year, I tend to think the latter, and I'm very vocal about my thoughts on the intelligence community."
How can working with people who aren't Snowden tell you that he wants to see the world burn? Or do you think that follows from your proposed dichotomy between "it's either all a deliberate conspiracy by everyone involved in it, even as janitor or secretary - or Snowden is a disgruntled worker"?
> "Read my previous comments if you want to see my thoughts on how the media has been getting it wrong, and what the deal is from the perspective of someone who worked in this community."
I did, but I just saw you criticizing specific claims of Snowden, probably correctly so -- that doesn't mean "the media get it wrong" wholesale, it just refutes those claims. The only other thing that seemed relevant was this: Working with the FBI folks at the TSC (Terrorist Screening Center), being dumb and incompetent doesn't even begin to describe what I saw. That can't be what you meant, so did I miss it, do I have to go further back, or was that bit about Snowden actually all?