Well, that's just those two agencies.

There are a lot more TLAs out there that you've never heard of.

Enjoy living in a police state, serfs.

This seems excessive

You need to be calling out McDermott, Cantwell, and Murray as well - our own local reps who are likewise supporting this. Fuck them all.

PS - stop donating any money to Dems until they fix this.

I actually have mixed feelings about this. I mean, better surveillance means less need for street-level thuggery and behavioral restriction. In principle I'd rather have high-level informational oversight than overweight racists actually physically groping me and pawing through my bags at the airport. Unfortunately, well, there's that whole enormous weight of historical cases of government agencies abusing pretty much every power they can in every way possible instead of actually competently using their authority to protect people, so... yeah. I don't know.

Certainly the fact that this was all done in relative secrecy does not bode at all well. I'm a bit radical in my beliefs about total two-way transparency... but it does need to be either two-way, or bottom-up. Transparency that only lets the powerful spy on the weak is a tool of oppression, no two ways about it.

How is this new scary? I've just always assumed since the inception of the internet that if somebody, especially the government, wanted to record my online activity then they could. I'm not saying it's OK, good, bad or otherwise, I just assumed that it was possible and happening for longer than that article even implies.

I also presume that people who wish to take great pains to encrypt and hide their activity, then they can probably thwart this-but the people I know who do go to great lengths to avoid insecure lines of communication also usually have the most boring innocuous information that is of no use to anyone.

Obviously Obama should have not done any of these bad security-state things that the entire United States government had committed to doing for several years before he took office. And then been impeached in his first term, with his entire agenda in tatters.

After all, that's what I thought I was voting for when I voted for him, and that says nothing at all about how closely my expectations conform to reality. It's also why the bulk of our ire should fall on the party that didn't bring this whole surveillance apparatus into being in the first place.

Have fun looking at my cat pictures, Obama!

4: how is that supposed to help? Do you suppose the Republicans would be any better, considering Bush rammed thru the Patriot Act and set up PRISM in the first place?

I'm with 6. The only thing I found surprising about this news is that anyone found it surprising.

And I would add that even if the US Government wasn't doing this, the Chinese (among others) probably are. You should assume you have no privacy from government (any government) surveillance online unless you've taken steps to ensure it yourself.

I'm lost on how this surprises anyone. I mean, haven't you seen the movies?

This story seems to come up every few years, and we're all supposed to clench our jaws and wring our hands.

I say meh. The thing that irritates me about it is that there is no way collecting that much information can be useful. Plus, I don't think the government is competent enough to be able to do anything with it. I've worked for private sector companies with a profit motive to handle data right, and extremely over-compensated brainiacs at the helm who couldn't figure out how to design a database. If they can't do it, neither can the Feds.

This won't go away, because just like every other program we've lumped under the umbrella of that rathole we call "national defense", too many people rely on it for the livelihood.

It might be worth pausing for a moment before having a paroxysm of paranoia over this news (as if it is news). How exactly could the government possibly have enough resources to be monitoring what everyone is doing online? This is the sort of thing that conspiracy wingnuts believe. I'm envisioning an infinite number of monkeys sitting in front of an infinite number of computer monitors, reading everyone's email and SLOG posts.

At best they could be using data mining to look for certain patterns, visitors to certain sites, certain key words. And anyone that is for real shocked to discover that this sort of thing is going on is just a tiny bit naive. Reminds me about the shock and outrage from certain quarters when news about the torturing of war on terror detainees became more widespread when sources in the military and CIA had essentially declared torture was part of the game plan within days of 9/11.

By this point, I imagine the Feds are getting pretty sick of porn and cats.

Also what @12 said.

Maybe the thing for all of us to do is re-read 1984 and continue this discussion afterwards.

My outrage petered out on this one some time ago.

Back in the early nineties it was commonly believed that the NSA was collecting email. For a time I included a string of randomly generated words at the end of every message to overload the keyword triggers.

Around the same time, I remember attending an NSA talk at MIT about the clipper chip where the spokesperson joked that if we had any questions about the talk we should call our mother and tell her what they were and he'd get back to us with the answer.

He also strongly implied they'd broken RSA, but I think that was just a dig at Rivest who was in the audience.

Point being, yes, they are doing this. They are collecting your email headers, they are collecting transactional phone data, they can make a map of where every American who used a cell phone is today within a few miles, the government has long monitored credit histories and all manner of other databases available for purchase.

The only silver lining I see is that just handling the data is so impossibly complex that there probably isn't a lot they can do with it in general. Though it does provide a treasure trove for finding info about one person, if the data retrieval times aren't overly onerous, and if anyone will admit they have the data in the first place.

What makes you think they're only Hoovering up Verizon phone data? Or do T-Mobile customers have a pass?

The govt is watching you a lot less than the advertisers.

what @18 said

Have you read G. Orwell's "Animal Farm"?...

The paradigm is changing. It's no longer about what and how much "they" know [about us], it's more about what can they do to us knowing what they know (pretty much a lot if not almost everything).

Regardless, I'd be careful about judgements about or against Obama in these matters.