I would recommend Peter Lee's article from last week, which looks at the experiences of three very senior ex members of the NSA who went through official channels to Whistleblow illegal NSA activities
Underpinning all of this however and its utterly incredible downplaying in the Western Media, is that we now see exposed, officially sanctioned criminality on a scale and magnitude that dwarfs previous scandals such as Watergate. The people responsible for this programme should be in Prison without their feet touching the ground. Instead they are free and trying to arrest the lead witnesses for the prosecution.
That's because in this digital age,
* you can do so much more for less (relatively), that means, in this "nodes and nexus" structure of digital communication network, as long the government can afford the processing power and storage capacity, you can snoop and store mountain loads of data;
* with the internet built upon the network first laid down by the US DoD, most internet data route through the US, so snooping in the US means snooping the world - unless, of course, you're working on a sealed network;
* with the right man sitting at the right chair, the so-called judicial oversight will be nothing more than rubber stamp.
This whole affair's biggest impact isn't its extent and scale - face it, we always suspicious of being watched, with the world this "wired" any self respecting power would do their damn best to stay in the game - but that now it blew open, the US can no longer shamelessly finger pointing others for doing what the US has been doing all along.
So I won't be, unlike those idiots protesting 2 weekends ago, decrying the US for snooping or demand it to cease - in the same logic of objecting the closure of Gitmo or end of PATRIOT Act, Americans will in the end support the US government of snooping the world's cyberspace, even if that means their Facebook rantings or porn site surfing records -along with their bank records and phone records - will be forever archived in a NSA digital archive somewhere.
If you don't want to be snooped in this day and age, your only choice is to live with no computer and phones, no handheld devices, out in the middle of nowhere and keep track of the orbiting timetable of satellites. Privacy is something we all sacrifice for the convenience and comfort in the digital, web2.0 age.
