risking his life to tell you about NSA surveillance [ot]

First off, he's not dead. The regime in power now wouldn't allow him to exist if he truly were a threat.

"First off, he's not dead. The regime in power now wouldn't allow him to exist if he truly were a threat."

"Well, if you were talking W's crew true, otherwise I'd say you're spot on with that moniker of yours."

One of the National Security Agency’s most powerful tools of mass surveillance makes tracking someone’s Internet usage as easy as entering an email address, and provides no built-in technology to prevent abuse.

Today, The Intercept is publishing 48 top-secret and other classified documents about XKEYSCORE dated up to 2013, which shed new light on the breadth, depth and functionality of this critical spy system — one of the largest releases yet of documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

In the days after the attack in San Bernardino, federal investigators determined the shooters, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, were inspired by Islamist extremists and had spoken of jihad online as long ago as 2013. But those communications were “private direct messages,” the FBI said, and would not have been detected by U.S. intelligence employees.

Obama said national security officials will use the San Bernardino shooting to“learn whatever lessons we can and make any improvements that are needed.”

The challenge is how we as a society authorize our government to keep us on a path of democratic ideals and life that we prefer, between two opposing forces that threaten these:
1) Foreign powers that would like to topple US and send us back to the stone age, Sharia law, etc.
2) US shadow/hidden government (powerful people? corporations?) that uses people's fear of #1 to give up basic freedoms and societal expectations to give more power to an emergent elite/ruling class whilst the remainder of society lives under constant surveillance, and in complete fear and powerlessness.

The tightrope of democracy....

"These disclosures about the Obama administration’s killing program reveal that there’s a part of the American character that is deeply concerned with the unrestrained, unchecked exercise of power. And there is no greater or clearer manifestation of unchecked power than assuming for oneself the authority to execute an individual outside of a battlefield context and without the involvement of any sort of judicial process."

...."we, the people, are ultimately the strongest and most reliable check on the power of government. The insiders at the highest levels of government have extraordinary capability, extraordinary resources, tremendous access to influence, and a monopoly on violence, but in the final calculus there is but one figure that matters: the individual citizen.

And there are more of us than there are of them."

By the 2nd century, the need for an empire-wide intelligence service was clear. But even an emperor could not easily create a new bureau with the express purpose of spying on the citizens of Rome's far-flung domains. A suitable compromise was found by Hadrian. He envisioned a large-scale operation and turned to the frumentarii. The frumentarius was the collector of wheat in a province, a position that brought the official into contact with enough locals and natives to acquire considerable intelligence about any given territory. Hadrian put them to use as his spies, and thus had a ready-made service and a large body to act as a courier system.