"NONE of this would have happened without the revelations by Edward J. Snowden"

[JDPriestly]

81. There is only one side to the metadata issue.

And that is the side of the potential defendants in criminal prosecutions and the potential victims of blackmail by unscrupulous individuals in government.

In other words, all citizens.

The metadata is saved. The actual content of calls and communications will soon be saved if it isn't already.

It may be difficult for some to understand, but what Snowden is saying is that the government has the capacity to review every communication you have made in your life since the maintenance of its computer records and find that one mistake you made, that one time you lied or simply, out of confusion or the desire for privacy, contradicted something you said elsewhere, your one error and use that to ruin you.

If you don't think this is possible, read history. Read about the inquisitions. Read about the witch hunts in Salem, read about the NAZIs, read about the gulags. Couldn't happen here? Oh, yes, it could.

We don't have to be paranoid to understand that a clever mind can concoct all kinds of false accusations and then, out of evidence of a lifetime of "randome" comments find "facts" to support the accusations.

The collection of metadata is far more dangerous than most people can imagine especially since they aren't really just collecting metadata. They are just accessing the metadata, but they are also preparing to collect, if not already collecting the content of all of our communications.

It is beyond me how anyone who is not paid to be blind to this cannot see what is happening.