It would seem the effect is to inspire confidence that our national secutiry apparatus is doing everything it can to head off threats before they happen. It seems that 90% of the outrage is container on reddit and HN.
> It seems that 90% of the outrage is container on reddit and HN.
Then you seriously need to expand your horizons on information intake, because human rights orgs are pissed off, Ecuador and Hong Kong are pissed off. Germany, and the EU as a whole are considering a wide range of actions, and so on.
"Security experts and democracy proponents say that mainland China’s domestic surveillance operations in Hong Kong are far more extensive than the American effort. But those operations have largely disappeared from public discussion as attention has focused on the many details released by Mr. Snowden."
There's outrage everywhere but I hear what you're saying and I kind of agree. This kind of opinion will get you ignored or looked down upon on Reddit and HN but I kind of dont care. What I see in those places is a lot of impotent rage and speculation that comes a lot like "how smart can I make myself sound here".
I personally am not okay with the alleged surveillance of practically everyone in the world who uses a phone or the web. That's just not okay. But is that really what's happening? What I'm seeing in the actual documents that have leaked is that the NSA has the ability to surveil anyone using most services but I'm not seeing anything that shows that they actually are just collecting these vast swaths of data and aimlessly looking for incriminating things. What I do see is that they use this ability to target certain individuals and that they're allowed to do this because of a rubber stamp process in secret courts. I also see that sometimes in the process of targeting on person or a group of people, other innocent parties get caught in that net. This is what I've seen in the evidence. Now the editorial that goes along with it, which is what everyone is loving to eat up right now paints a darker picture.
Is what we really know scary? It certainly can be but I'm of two minds about it. On the one hand I see law enforcement doing its job and doing it without breaking the law and, for the most part, ethically. I'm talking about capturing the data of known terrorists and such. Then there's the egotistical, kind of immature, smarter-than-everyone-else side of me who hates this and thinks its the devil. This power can be abused in so many ways its not even funny. But how narcissistic can I be to think that anything I do is being watched by the NSA. Even if I were an activist, would they really care? There are so many other ways to target free speech and stamp out political dissent that are already in use today that you don't even need the NSA's prism to do it.
What I guess I'm getting at is that I don't think either view is right. Those who think this is just fine and no big deal are naive and those who think this is a grand government conspiracy to create a police state are also naive. It's hard to take either group seriously. The truth is somewhere in the middle where PRISM can be a useful tool but at the same time needs to be just open enough to where citizens can have an intelligent discussion of where to draw certain lines and what kind of oversight is needed.
As for Snowden, he now comes off as a narcissist who got played by a reporter for a huge story. Is there an element of giving a shit to Greenwald's reporting? Of course. But to think Greenwald ran with this out of pure love of democracy or some other equally trite reason is hard to believe. And for Snowden to take so fucking many top secret documents then fly off to, so far, two countries who would absolutely love to get their hands on them for their own purposes only looks bad for him. Being a whistleblower would qualify him as heroic but taking all that classified info then flying to Hong Kong (regardless of how close their government is or isn't with China) and Russia would qualify him as a traitor.
I know this isn't the big bad government conspiracy story we all like to jump in on around here but I think its closer to reality than either of the other two ends of the spectrum that we normally hear the vast majority of the time.
You seem to be conflating PRISM with NSA's entire SIGINT operation, I see a lot of people doing that. PRISM is one out of 504 programs that collectively obtain vast amounts of information (approximately 350 billion telephone and internet records globally in the month of March 2013). That is 4 trillion records per year, after filtering the data.
PRISM is an inconsequential piece of the puzzle, and truthfully one of the most innocuous. Nobody is really disputing that it collects information on only a small number of people. However, other NSA programs very clearly do not - they collect everything on everyone, then look at the interesting parts.
As of right now, the NSA has a blank check to collect any data they want and can retroactively obtain warrants for accessing that data. You can argue about the merits of what they are doing, but I see very little basis in arguing that they aren't actually collecting vast amounts of communications.
Personally, I think there is absolutely no way to stuff this genie back in the bottle.
