For me, one of the most important parts of Snowden's relevations is not just what they show about the extent of the NSA's surveillance, but the fact that this data collection has been placed in the hands of private contractors.

Private companies are being paid billions of taxpayer dollars and are profiting handsomely for doing NSA's dirty work. The current head of Booz Allen, the contractor who employed Snowden, is Mike McConnell, former head of the NSA. The current head of the NSA used to work for the Booz Allen. This incestuous revolving door relationship between private, for-profit corporations and government agencies basically guarantees that (a) funding for these operations will continue to grow, and (b) the War on Terror (which is the current raison d'etre for this whole surveillance apparatus) will never end, since it contributes so nicely to the private contractors' bottom line.

Aside from the scope of the surveillance itself, there's something very wrong here in regard to the whole paradigm of corporate/government entwinement. The trend is already well underway to treat activists and protestors as "terrorists" if they object to such things as environmental destruction (Fracking, Keystone Pipeline), animal cruelty (factory farms and slaughterhouses), or GMO crops (Monsanto).

It's not just the "Military Industrial Complex" that Eisenhower warned us about. It has now morphed into the Military Intelligence Complex, which cannot be anything but anathema to a "Republic of the People, by the People, and for the People." When the government can use its secret surveillance capability to treat its own people as potential threats, we are no longer living in a free democracy.

sw