I'm reading through these comments and really laughing my ass off at the bold, crazy rhetoric being used here.

Orwellian governments! Everyone is just a complacent cog! America is it's own worst enemy! No more freedom!

I mean, I admit, this specific act seems pretty dumb on the government's part. I have no idea why the government would silence Twitter or Yahoo. And given that they didn't care enough to explain, seems like it was probably a legal bug. Maybe some 60 year-old anti-Internet Congress member that thought SOPA was genius got cranky one day and sent some phone calls. I don't know; doesn't seem like anyone that truly has power in government cares, or else they'd succeed in silencing. This doesn't seem like "an extraordinary effort by the government"; this is the same government that dropped two nukes in order to end a worldwide war, so if they really cared about what your favorite anti-government Reddit liberal had to say in in a 140-character long witticism, they'd be able to really shut it down.

But I have a feeling that these alarmist and dramatic comments regarding FASCIST AUTHORITARIAN GOVERNMENTS HOLDING THE TRUE ARTISTS DOWN! have much more to do with the general reddit.com/r/technology culture of shitting on everything the government has been doing since last June. And that culture is much more retarded and out-of-hand than anything PRISM could possibly be.

It seems like what the government is doing with user data since PRISM is very similar to what advertisers have been doing with user data since Fucking Forever, the government doing it for it's ideals regarding terrorism and advertisers doing it for the moolah. But the point is the same -- massive data collection and other forms statistical analysis that you dramatic fucks label "spying" in order to seem passionate and cool has been going on for a while. Just that the government is a much bigger and more complex system than your average advertiser, so you seem like a hip and happening individual by attacking it.

Most people really don't give a shit about massive data collection. I mean, sure, everyone's a Reddit slacktivist nowadays, throwing around words like "spying!" and "privacy!" but no one really cares, or else we'd all be using rsync + ftp and BitMessage and all that idealistic free software stuff that RMS peddles. People just want to seem special and cool and smart and advanced when they post about how EVIL the government is for spying on all of us. But no one honestly cares, or else no one would use Facebook and Google and Apple products.

And should you care?

Is it really that significant, your tiny, indistinguishable contribution to our advertising overlords that isn't even tied to your personal identity? Is it really that creepy or a violation of privacy? It's not like the government knows that specifically Omar Hegazy and E1ven, they don't care about everyone's specific identities (but that would be truly creepy). I mean, even if they have your specific data tied to your real name, it's not like the NSA has people actually listening and looking at your conversation and spying on who you are and what you do. That would be statistically impossible. There are 316 million American citizens, 204 million e-mails sent per minute, and 1.26 billion Facebook users, and only 75 thousand NSA employees.

Could they really be reading all your e-mails tied to you the person, are they even capable of that? They wouldn't be able to spy on each and every one of you even if they tried, and that wouldn't make sense, either. So I'm pretty sure the only thing that knows about you you is the program transferring stuff from Google's servers to NSA servers, and you can trust that one to not be sentient enough to care.

So. They're not spying on individual people, cause they physically can't - but that would really be creepy. They're checking on aggregate statistics. And when you're just another brick in the wall of statistical analysis, is it really all that creepy? Do they really know all that much specifically about you?

But why are they looking at aggregate statistics, you ask?

Good question. Don't laugh -- I think it's terrorism ? I mean sure, that seems like such a cop-out answer from our perspective. But how do we know that the only reason that terrorism isn't a threat anymore isn't because of the American government putting it's foot down? Couldn't it be that the government's seemingly creepy obsession with fighting against terrorism is the reason Al-Qaeda and such have failed so hard that we just laugh at the possibility of them being a threat? If terrorism isn't a threat anymore, couldn't it be that shows that the government's way is working? I mean, this bin Laden guy. His family was filthy fucking rich, man. They were connected to Saudi royalty. These Al-Qaeda guys had fucking planes, man. And they reaaaaalllllly didn't like us. So obviously, if we just did nothing about it, they probably would've struck again ...

But I don't know. I haven't done enough research on this topic myself. Maybe the government's obsession with terrorism is a bit too much and while we should be worrying about this issue in order to keep it from happening, maybe 20x the military budget of the next 10 countries on the list combined is a bit too far. Or maybe it's just the right amount. I don't know, I read programming books in my free time, not political discourse.

But it's just so obvious from their alarmist bullshit that these Reddit libertarians haven't done their research either. They just want to seem like they have.