Seems to me that a blackmail operation would be fairly easy: First, get the data from the NSA, IRS, Treasury, etc. Second, find someone where the data shows t

Seems to me that a blackmail operation would be fairly easy: First, get the data from the NSA, IRS, Treasury, etc. Second, find someone where the data shows that they have been doing something they don't want to become public. Third, go to that person and "make them an offer they can't refuse". The offer? Sure: become an informant, become a mole, do some dirty work, say, hand over some data, get some dirt on someone else. The "can't refuse" part? Fairly easy: The government doesn't have to release the embarrassing data directly. Instead, the government could just have someone, maybe anonymously, give some 'tips' to some local, dirty politicians or some reporters looking for a scandal and then just let them follow the person, get the data themselves, and then go public. Or, if prominent citizen Joe is a political opponent of an Administration, then poor Joe would have to be 100% totally clean of anything embarrassing or questionable or he could get some nearly anonymous communications that he might want to cool down, back off, and get on the team of the Administration. The blackmailing doesn't have to be for money. A big thing about blackmail is that the victim very much does not want to go public, not even after they are being blackmailed. Blackmail is a very old game and works very well, and mostly all that is needed to have a victim is someone who has a secret they very much don't want to have made public that some potential blackmailer knows, and that situation applies to a large fraction of the population. Remember the old exchange: "If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to worry about." with the response "Nearly everyone has something to hide." With the Verizon data, IRS data, and financial record data, have a good shot at blackmailing any of a significant fraction of the whole population. As many dictatorships have shown, with such efforts, can have a large fraction of the population under the thumb of the dictatorship acting as informants, moles, etc. in the population. It can all be close to mafia techniques: A low level mafia guy who has done something illegal then has to remain loyal to the family or face the police for his crime. So, early in a blackmail attempt, get the victim to do something illegal, and then forever threaten to turn them over to the police. Again, it's all very old stuff, and the Verizon data, IRS data, and financial data could enable oceans of it.