I know this will, forever, brand me the NSA Defending, lackey of authoritarianism; but ...

[dawg]

92. "If they spied on all of us ..."

They kinda sorta are. That's why some of us are so unhappy.

From Wikipedia:

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

Media reports documenting the existence and functions of classified surveillance programs and their scope began on June 5, 2013, and continued throughout the entire year. The first program to be revealed was PRISM, with reports from both The Washington Post and The Guardian published an hour apart. PRISM allows for a court-approved, front-door access to Americans' Google and Yahoo accounts.[151][160] The Post's Barton Gellman was the first journalist to report on Snowden's documents. He said the U.S. government urged him not to specify by name which companies were involved, but Gellman decided that to name them "would make it real to Americans."[161] Reports also revealed details of Tempora, a British black-ops surveillance program run by the NSA's British partner, GCHQ.[162][163] The initial reports included details about NSA call database, Boundless Informant, and of a secret court order requiring Verizon to hand the NSA millions of Americans' phone records daily,[164] the surveillance of French citizens' phone and internet records, and those of "high-profile individuals from the world of business or politics."[165][166][167] XKeyscore, which allows for the collection of "almost anything done on the internet," was described by The Guardian as a program that "shed light" on one of Snowden's more contentious claims: "I, sitting at my desk [could] wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email."[168]
It was revealed that the NSA was harvesting millions of email and instant messaging contact lists,[169] searching email content,[170] tracking and mapping the location of cell phones,[171] undermining attempts at encryption via Bullrun[172][173] and that the agency was using cookies to "piggyback" on the same tools used by internet advertisers "to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance."[174] The NSA was shown to be "secretly" tapping into Yahoo and Google data centers to collect information from "hundreds of millions" of account holders worldwide by tapping undersea cables using the MUSCULAR program.[151][152]