I love big brother, he takes care of us, we have nothing to fear, see I am good, please dont kill me with your drones!

Not to mention all the stories that ran a while back about the huge new data storage facility that they were building to store all this crap indefinitely.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

The sheer capacity of that site that was revealed while it was still being built gave plenty of people plenty of insight on how much the NSA was planning to collect and store.

rpottage1 a troll? What gave it away? The <10 post count? ;)

I've never stated what they are doing is illegal. I have said it is unconstitutional. Those are two different things.

And no, I don't trust the FISA court at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/...igence_Surveillance_Court

We don't know who is on it or what transpires there. It is a non-adversarial court. I love how 3rd parties can submit briefs -- how the hell would that happen except at the invitation of the US Gov't since it is secret????

NPR 2 hours ago: http://www.npr.org/...p-for-government-requests

I can't help but associate the word "patriot" with rednecks in Merika shirts at Walmart. So that word means very little.

The traitors are the douchers power tripping over the constitution.

So this guy is a hero. Not a walmart Patriot. Not a traitor.

At a hearing before the Senate appropriations committee yesterday the head of the NSA had to switch back and forth between actually answering Senators' questions and saying it was "classified". Most of the times he had to state "classified" he agreed to talk about it in a closed session happening today.

He also spent much of the time suggesting that a lot of this stuff should be declassified in order to help reassure the public about what is going on.

The point to THIS thread -- would that hearing, or the call for declassification, or the national dialog, or the attention to the erosion in trust in the US gov't EVER have happened if not for Snowden?

Woudl the head of the NSA be calling for declassification of FISA and NSA pogram information without Snowden?

No, he wouldn't.

Could Snowden have accomplished this internally? According to him, he raised these questions internally many times and received the equivalent of slammed doors and brush-offs. He eventually concluded that going public was the only option. He also carefully handled the information so as not to "go public" with specific details that would endanger operations in progress (as Manning did with his blanket detailed record leak).

Watching the full interview with Snowden is really enlightening, IMHO. I don't place him in the same camp as Manning at all. In fact, I would say Snowden's actions damage Mannings case by setting a better example...

Someone will be murdered tonight, so we should arrest everyone now to prevent it from happening.

Is this post count better? No, I'm not a troll; nor has anyone been able to explain how exactly I'm wrong. Your post, in fact, supports when I said that this isn't new and has been going on for quite awhile.

Something that's unconstitutional is illegal.

It doesn't matter whether you trust the court or not; it still exists. I already pointed out it's a yes-man court that never says no and that such a thing is, in part, how they loosened the restrictions so much as to do what they want legally.