> I am an American patriot.

The author may believe he or she’s a patriot. I disagree. I don’t believe someone who acts to subvert the Bill of Rights which states

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

is even remotely close to being a patriot.

> Many are concerned about the NSA listening to their phone calls and reading their email messages. I believe that most should not be very concerned because most are not sending email to intelligence targets.

> Email that isn’t related to intelligence is rarely viewed, and it’s even less often viewed if it’s from a US citizen.

“Rarely” is pretty meaningless. The NSA has repeatedly tried to compare the number looked at with the number of intercepts. Of course they’re only looking at a tiny percentage. But if I were to only steal one-in-a-billion dollars in the US or only kill one-in-a-million people, I’d still be doing something immoral.

> Every Agency employee goes through orientation, in which we are taught about the federal laws that govern NSA/US Cyber Command: Title 10 and Title 50.

Yet evidence seems to show that they've willfully found ways to interpret the laws in ways that the authors of the laws think is illegal.

> We all know that it's illegal to look at a US citizen's data without a court order.

But the NSA has a special non-adversarial court that rubber-stamps whatever it wants. (And it still happened)

> I use the term "look" deliberately: the Agency makes the distinction that looking at data is surveillance, while gathering it from locations outside the US is not. We gathered everything, and only looked at a tiny percentage of it.

The problem is that the 4th Ammendment makes no such distinction. They were wrong in collecting it in the first place.

> I am okay with this distinction both because I don't mind if my emails are copied to an Agency database and likely never read and because from a technical standpoint it would seriously impair our ability to spy if we couldn't gather everything.*

He may not mind, but many other people do. I respectfully ask that he, Mr. Clapper, and Gen Alexander give us all their data in case we later do find what they were doing was illegal.

> The Agency is an intelligence organization, not a law enforcement agency.

> The NSA copy of my emails won't be viewed by police or FBI investigating me about marijuana use, for instance.

And yet, per Reuters

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...

“A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.
“Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.”

> The NSA copy of my emails will only be viewed if the Agency can convince a judge that I might be a foreign agent. And the judges aren't pushovers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellige...

During the 25 years from 1979 to 2004, 18,742 warrants were granted, while just four were rejected. Fewer than 200 requests had to be modified before being accepted, almost all of them in 2003 and 2004. The four rejected requests were all from 2003, and all four were partially granted after being submitted for reconsideration by the government. Of the requests that had to be modified, few if any were before the year 2000. During the next eight years, from 2004 to 2012, there were over 15,100 additional warrants granted, with an additional seven being rejected. In all, over the entire 33-year period, the FISA court has granted 33,942 warrants, with only 11 denials – a rejection rate of 0.03 percent of the total requests.

> They won’t spent time on my private love letters.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57605051-38/nsa-offers-det...

> That security we had is gone. North Korea has nuclear weapons and is threatening to fire them at the US.

How does spying on Americans help?

> Reality should enter your cost-benefit analyses.

I totally agree.

> This essay was deemed UNCLASSIFIED and approved for public release by the NSA's office of Pre-Publication Review on 11/21/2013 (PP 14-0081).

Somehow, I have a feeling that opposing points of view wouldn’t find much an easy clearance.