who and how actively they are doing it should be the main issue here Yes, it absolutely is. Yet for some reason you keep trying to defend their Orwellian ambi

who and how actively they are doing it should be the main issue here Yes, it absolutely is. Yet for some reason you keep trying to defend their Orwellian ambitions with some handwavy "they have always been spying, it's their job"... The NSA is not "spying" in the romantic sense that you seem to be caught up in. It is installing global surveillance, a google index of all communications worldwide (ICREACH). This goes far beyond keyword sniffing on phonecalls or opening letters. They are implementing the exact kind of surveillance that totalitarian regimes are condemned for (see e.g. the movie "The Lives of Others"), at an unprecedented scale. And their justification is the defense against a "threat" that is less likely to harm you or me than a lightning strike. If you can't see the blatant disproportion here, and the extreme concentration of power in an institution that has largely detached itself from democratic checks and balances, then you must really have paid not much attention to the Snowden revelations.