Yes, but what does the number mean? Indeed my reaction would not have been much different if the number of reports had been 100, or 10,000 - adding and/or dropp

Yes, but what does the number mean? Indeed my reaction would not have been much different if the number of reports had been 100, or 10,000 - adding and/or dropping a zero and seeing if your reaction changes is a good test to see if you've really learned anything from a number - a Feynman trick, I think? So to ground my sense of scale I looked at Wiki. Wiki tells me the NSA has 30-40,000 employees (accurate? who knows). So apparently about 2-3% annually use this "hotline", whatever it is. Is that a big amount or a little amount? Hard to tell without knowing the culture around using it. Are there forms to fill in, do you speak to an operator, what? What range of things does it cover - everything from "I think PRISM is unconstitutional" to "I caught coworker Bob stalking his ex on XKeyscore"? If not everything, then where do you complain about the other things? What, exactly, are the "official channels"? <meta> Pardon me for going meta for a minute here. The parent comment was downvoted. Yet it is entirely correct, civilly worded, and contributes to the discussion. I hypothesize that this is because it is not a productive place to end the thought. I don't think a comment deserves to be downvoted for that. The right response isn't "no", it's "yes, but...". That "yes" should mean an upvote, if we are trying to form a collaborative thought process here rather than each individual simply leaving their mark. </meta>