> Without any legal barriers to such collection, U.S. persons must increasingly rely on the affected companies to implement security measures to keep their comm

> Without any legal barriers to such collection, U.S. persons must increasingly rely on the affected companies to implement security measures to keep their communications private. I kind of despair when I read such statements. How is a company like Google supposed to protect against an attacker that has legal access to parts of their network, actively researches zero day exploits, bribes or subpoenas employees to work with them and bugs their hardware when it is sent via mail. The only thing we could do on the technological side would be to re-decentralize our communications with added end-to-end encryption. While I'm a huge fan of that, I don't see it happening anytime soon given the ever increasing cloud computing hype. The usability of some services would also certainly take a hit. And even then our metadata will remain public. What is really necessary is a huge cultural shift in the executive branches of our governments. Not just some small reform but a powerful independent investigation board to uncover what the agencies are allowed to do, believe to be allowed to do and actually do.