I'm surprised people think their daily activities are that important.

Don't they have webcams that look like fruit flies and can scan your apartment night and day?

What you say on the web is the least of your concerns. It may not even matter.

I'm glad that people have been shaken out of their illusion that information on the internet is somehow unseen by anyone but themselves, but is in fact virtually exposed to anyone with enough ski11z.

But seriously, the NSA doesn't give a flying fuck about you or me. The are interested in nation-state level actors... corporations, governments, banks (& major money flows in general), militaries large and small, etc.

Anyone who has worked with data knows that more data is better than less, because you can obtain greater clarity for whatever your searching. So the NSA isn't going to stop hoovering the Internet and phone metadata or calls, they'll only increase their capabilities in those regards. Citizens' digital traffic will continue to be absorbed by their omniscient sponge, as much as they possibly can.

The real danger, of course, is that if everything is sitting in ginormous databases, then as soon as you become someone of interest, they can review your past online actions at a whim. Additionally, there is the real potential of "access creep", meaning that eventually the FBI or even local police will have direct access to subsets of the NSA datahoard, and, well, you can write your own story from there. Lord knows that governments tend not to like activists of any stripe (unless they are helping create social divisions).

Despite Snowden's revelations, the one positive for the NSA out of all this is the "chilling effect" it has on people, making their yet more fearful, and therefore more controllable.

*whatever you are searching, not 'your'.
and *making them yet more fearful. Christ.

@1, @2, @4, and @5: Fuck you, you, you, and you. You don't get to say whose life is worthy of privacy and whose is not.

They're interested in journalists and dissidents. The more effective someone is at rocking the boat or exposing malfeasance, the more interesting that person is to the unconstitutional assholes at NSA.

Cut that shit out, or when you finally get around to trying to effect change and they come to neutralize you, you'll be all alone and there will be nobody left willing to report on it.