Could Glenn Greenwald go to jail? The law is alarmingly murky

You think the government is watching every piece of data on the internet for only $20million/year? Really?

However, the problem is not that elected officials are not listening to the people, it is that there is little concern from the electorate about privacy rights.

Ultimately, the country does belong to you more for understanding the problems of eroding privacy rights more than someone who doesn't. One could argue that rioting would change the conversation in a productive way, but I expect it would further the cause of authoritarians if a group of people behind a minority viewpoint tried to advance their cause through the violence of rioting.

I firmly believe that democracy can only function with transparency and a free press, but those are means to democracy, not a goal in themselves. It makes no sense to wish for riots, which are intrinsically anti-democratic when not expressing the will of the majority, for the sake of making a country safer for democracy.

Much as when our country was torturing people, the problem is less that of a disobedient set of elected officials, and more that of some really bad ideas that are held by a large portion of the population. Unfortunately, right now the problem is not politicians who can be easily demonized, but a population that for now is largely ignorant about the power of data.

American public opinion is for prosecuting Snowden. This can be because they are un-informed or have a different value set from the mean of HN. If the former, how can we educate enough people to form a critical majority in favour of privacy reform?

If the latter, the process is slower and more complicated. A starting point would be writing and paying visits to decision makers. My impression has been that the lack of communication from U.S. citizens to D.C. has left decision makers with the impression that this is, at most, a foreign relations problem.

Not all elites are in D.C., mind you. Speak with influential and high profile individuals you know. Encourage them to bring this up in the media or at the next conference they are at.

Sound difficult? Convincing people to change the status quo should be. Rioting to short-circuit this process is the equivalent of dialectical violence. Less charitably, it is the making of noise and commotion in the hope that someone else will pick up the baton and do the leg-work for you.

> why people think this type of surveillance is good

There's a difference believing that this type of surveillance is good and believing that Snowden should be prosecuted for leaking in the way that he did.

> "that's questionable, but even so, your rights and liberties are violated."

A more pointed example might be: indiscriminate surveillance can be used by corrupt officials for political persecution of their domestic political enemies. Look no further than the recent IRS scandal to see the willingness and ability of people in positions of power using the levers of power against political opponents, even when the stakes are low or petty. The NSA database of information represents an unbelievable trove of opportunity for the very real prospect of the arbitrary abuse of political power, both by people within the U.S. government and by anyone who manages to illicitly gain access to that information (e.g. foreign hackers—and there's some evidence that Chinese hacking attempts on Google were aimed at the interface Google set up to provide information to the government).

In a way it's off-topic, but your comment very much reminded my of something Tony Benn said in an interview ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_lYGyIaK80&t=2h36m47s ):

"Nowadays, all you do is hear the media's description of what the candidate is saying, and one of the strange things about it is that politics is now presented in terms of politicians and not politics. I don't think the media is interested in politics, they're interested in politicians, which is a wholly different subject... who's doing this, about their private life, about their background, about what they must be thinking, might be thinking when they said something, why did they say it; but what they say is very, very hard to hear. And I think this is, in a sense, indeed quite deliberately, destroying the genuine democratic base on which people are elected."

>All sides in a story should be covered.

So I should let creationists speak on stage on the same level as everyone else?

There was an editorial by (I think) the EIC of Nature. In it he talks about how giving people the floor for discussion in some way validates their positions, no matter how absurd, so the best solution is simply not to give them the floor.

If someone knows what article I'm talking about , please link it, it was extremely interesting read.

The definition I found of 'journamalism' is:

  An attempt to report the news marred with shoddy
  research, fact suppression, or a mere retyping of
  the press release/talking points

Giving fringe views and wild theories equal space doesn't seem to apply to this definition. I'm not saying that it's good journalism, but I'm not seeing it at 'journamalism.'

On the same token, not reporting facts like, "some people are Holocaust-deniers," just because their views might be wrong seems to fit with the 'fact suppression' definition of 'journamalism.'

Golden Rule of the Internet: Someone will always be pedantic unless you write your post to be airtight and have copious amounts of text covering all edge-cases. People always have a compulsion to evaluate what you wrote while ignoring the current context.

Did I say somewhere here that all articles on the Holocaust require an equal amount of time presenting the views of Holocaust-deniers? If not, then why assume that I'm making some sort of absolute statement?

I honestly don't much care what the courts say on this. My own personal opinion is that the 4th amendment is clear enough, and that "spy on everybody all the time" is not allowed, not even with a court order. If approval of a court were enough to allow this kind of thing, then why do police bother with specific warrants like "search address X for evidence of crime Y"? They could just get a single warrant that says "search everything for everything" and be done.

I fully expect this program to be upheld by the courts if it ever gets that far, but that's because I think the courts are largely corrupt, not because I think it's actually being done in a legal and constitutional manner.

The process and procedure of an FISC warrant is one of the things that is being called into question. Not to mention the fact that there are challenges to the true accessibility of this data or if it can be mined without metadata information being attached to it.

Putting aside Prism, I don't see how the cell phone metadata is compatible with the fourth amendment at all. The 4A exists specifically to ban general warrants that allow the government to seize whatever they want without any specificity. That's exactly what the FISC order authorizing metadata collection is. There really isn't any strict vs. liberal interpretation here that I can see.