The crux of the NSA story in one phrase: 'collect it all'

It will be just as wonderful as the voice-recognition software (like Siri) that runs on a similar principle, but this time it's for governing. And who wouldn't like Siri as mechanical a god?

That would depend on trusting the people that are spying on us in the first place to adhere to the treaty. I'm hoping that talented coders will continue to produce possible defenses to the obvious infringements of our basic right to be left alone.

If they have years worth of emails you wrote in your normal style to friends and colleagues, it may be hard to write anything of length anonymously without being recognized. They may have hundreds of hours of our voices recorded, and that may be fingerprintable too.

Entire data record of you over years, with `~non-finite' indefinitely long-term memory, with evolving code to sift and immediately provide answers to queries, knows you better than you. Hitting the `Enter' key, you are pwned by some `See Clearly, Act Quickly' strange strangers in Maryland. Those animal experiment abominations, with wires in heads, involuntarily switching muscles, entrapped organisms reduced to spastic robot tools, we.

There's still, however, the problem of the Fourth Amendment. To my High-School-Civics understanding of the US Government, these programs are patently unconstitutional.

If these programs are indeed essential to our security, if they are to become a permanent fixture of our civil society, then let the Constitution be amended to allow them. Otherwise, no amount of oversight by any (or all) of the branches of the government will be sufficient to legitimize any such programs.

And what happens if the government becomes the one that wants to cause regular citizens harm? How do you protest a government that knows everything, monitors everything?

My desires oppose your desires. Which of us gets to live in the world we desire to bring into being?

I hope the answer is that it is my world because I don't want to live in yours, thanks all the same.

9/11 was enabled by box cutters - the message was that this was super low tech and you often can't stop the most awful terrorism if people are really determined and feel they have nothing to lose. The good news for you is that news events are by definition rare and there's actually so little terrorism (in the west at least) - that's because there's not nearly as much motivation to commit these acts as many seem to believe, not because of robocops peering into your drawers.

Here's some fun statistics:

There are about 30,000 gun related deaths a year in the United States (19000 suicide, 11000 murders).

There are about another 30,000 vehicle related deaths a year in the United States.

There are about 3,000 people who died in the 9/11 attacks - the deadliest act of terrorism perpetrated against the United States.

Are you saying that we should use the massive spying apparatus - including invading cellphone calls and emails - to stop even one third of murders? How about stop one sixth of suicides before they happen?

Because that would save more Americans than stopping a 9/11 scale attack every year would do - which is more than the NSA is claimed to have done.

In reality, it would take 10 9/11 scale attacks on the US each and every year to rival the number of deaths caused by guns.

Do you support using the government spy apparatus to stop these gun deaths? If not, why support something that isn't appropriate for a /larger/ problem to solve a small one?

I think most Americans panicked when they felt attacked, and became total cowards - as did their leadership at the time.

The correct response to terrorism is simply to shrug it off and ignore it (or at least limit yourself to prudent measures) - the deaths, strictly speaking, are a statistical blip on the radar - but the damage you can do to your civil liberties and society at large can last decades and impact generations of an entire nation.

tl;dr: America got sucker punched, and just like a bitch, got all fearful and cowardly about how it acted. The NSA spying is a sign of that fear and cowardice (possibly being used to nefarious ends by people exploiting it).

He has to, to have any chance of what he's saying actually sticking. Do you follow his Twitter feed? People routinely accuse him of holding opinions exactly opposite to his actual ones, even though he's been writing about them and publishing in newspapers and books for years. There are a huge number of confused, ignorant noisemakers twisting everything.

Maybe it seems slow to you, but there's been more groundbreaking stuff in the last month or so than in all previous years of my whole life, so I'm willing to give him and his collaborators time to triple-check everything before publishing so that the stories are absolutely unassailable.

I think Greenwald is exactly the right guy to be doing this. I hope my life and chance affords me the opportunity to help him someday, maybe one millionth as much as he's helping us.