knowing phone calls are being recorded by the guv, have you changed your phone habits?

[dballance]

33. No, not at all.

Really, many of us mostly realized this was going on since the Bush Admin and "Warrantless Wiretapping" (actually, long before). Especially those of us who are tech nerds like Snowden and me. There seem to be quite a lot of us nerds now though and I know I've mentioned it on more than one occasion and with quite a serious tone to my friends. Not that I know anyone who is involved in government work enough to care about "National Security." But I've chastised many, many of my friends for their online practices they take for granted like FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter or their e-mail accounts. Not because of the government, but because of the civil/criminal liabilities it could cause them. Discovery in a civil or criminal case, not brought by the Feds, could be devastating to just about anyone now. Even the most Pollyanna, innocent person.

Many of the common data-warehousing, data-encryption and data-mining techniques pre-date W. Bush and 9-11. The NSA certainly does. They were most likely developed by the contract firms for the government as such much of the great leaps we've made in the US have always been. The ability of our government to siphon off data in huge amounts as opposed to their ability to analyze that data has been and issue for a while. They've been drinking out of the fire-hose for decades. That's not so much of an issue any longer. That's only going to get easier and easier for them to find the specific needles in the haystacks. That's why they're teaming with Google and Amazon.

ON EDIT: I believe one of the most important things Snowden has brought to the forefront is that it is so often "policy" not technology regulating how one behaves. The ability to employ enough watchers to watch the watchers gets expensive and difficult pretty quickly.