Having previously posted a similar comment to yours and subsequently thought about it a lot, there is one justification, weak as it may be, for focusing on Amer

Having previously posted a similar comment to yours and subsequently thought about it a lot, there is one justification, weak as it may be, for focusing on Americans in this. It's the potent implications of the democratic integrity of the nation that come from your government having a giant database on you. If they can, at will, get access to any and all of the communications of any citizen they have incredible power over the voting public. I have no doubt that at this point, if the Obama administration desperately wanted to get hold of some individual's communications - to discredit them, implicate them, or just learn better how to manipulate them - they could do it. I actually doubt they would do it, and I'm not suggesting they will. But once the means for the corruption are there, and the temptation is there, it is utterly inevitable that it will be used. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, etc. So for your case, yes, they are violating your privacy, and that's bad. But for US citizens, they are dismantling the very fabric of democracy itself. It's orders of magnitude more important than a mere raping of privacy.