Hoover's overreaches were one thing, and certainly created their own set of harms.

The level of overreach possible people's entire existence is logged in minute detail via online and electronic services -- your location, contacts, calls, and texts via your phone, your reading via your browser and ISP, emails, purchases, etc., is simply beyond compare in all of history.

The map circulating a few months back comparing the size of the surveillance archives of East Germany's Stasi vs. the NSA, if both were represented as paper files, is hugely telling:

http://falkvinge.net/2013/07/05/stasi-vs-the-u-s-nsa-back-to...