ginush

That supports my point. If there really was a mass surveillance regime as the paranoics claim, there would be no need for the border control agents to ask for social media posts to be shown on entry. They would already have this information.

Of course it is used. But unless you're a target of interest to intelligence analysts, the metadata generated by your online activities will be of no interest whatsoever. It won't even be looked at.

An analyst who is tasked with investigating, say, terrorist threats, is not going to be remotely interested in the browsing habits of random people who pose no threat whatsoever.

It's just pure paranoia. Yes, we know bulk interception is being done by intelligence agencies. No, they're not watching you. They have more important things to be getting on with.

Yes, and this is the only feasible approach given the huge technical advances in communications over the past few decades.

He sought revenge after not getting a desired job promotion. There was nothing noble about his intentions, just narcissistic fury with what he, in his narrow world view, saw as unfairness towards himself.

I find it amazing how many people have been taken in by the bullshit narrative he concocted about human rights and privacy. So gullible.

He helped our adversaries on an immense scale, and even went to live under the protection of one of them. Some patriot he is, gladly embracing the Russian regime.

No it doesn't. Think about it. Some computer somewhere that is involved in bulk interception happens to record your browser connecting to, say, the Hacker News website, at various dates and times. This is stored in a dataset. No-one ever views these connection records. No-one ever writes a query for the dataset that returns these connection records. These connection records are automatically deleted after the retention period is up. Clearly, you are not being surveilled.

We know now that communications are being intercepted in bulk as a matter of intelligence gathering, but that does not equate to everyone being surveilled by the government.

What this actually provides, first and foremost, is the capability to perform targeted surveillance more rapidly, and to do so temporally by reaching into datasets already recorded. Obviously this provides a much-needed capability for legitimate investigations, where the target of interest and their identifying markers may not yet be known.

I hope he's still not deluding himself into thinking he did anything positive.