I'll definitely agree that the drone strikes are controversial and leave it at that since I think it's separate topic altogether.

On the other topics you brought up: there were a total of 12 cases reported by the NSA in the LOVEINT scandal, and an additional 3 were said to be under investigation without further details[1]. The violations varied in severity: of the 12 for which details were given, 7 resigned or retired, 3 others had their clearances revoked, 1 was stripped of his promotion and given a 10-day suspension without pay, and the last was given a written reprimand. 7 of them had their cases either forwarded to the DoJ or their military command (or both). Of those 12 cases, only 3 were targeting US citizens - the other 9 were instances of NSA employees abusing the system to target foreign nationals for their own purposes. I stress the word abuse - that's exactly what was going on, but this is also an example of the system working to find bad apples and kick them out. You see the same thing with cops - you expect there to be bad ones here and there. It's the police force's responsibility to identify them and either discipline them or kick them out; it's not indicative of systemic police corruption.

The only report of nude photo sharing was one that Snowden said himself. He made the claim a full year after his initial leaks and never substantiated it with any evidence.

With regards to the Muslim targeting, if you look at the original article[2], every one of the 5 people listed by Greenwald has "FBI" in the responsible agency column. According to the article, there are 7485 e-mail addresses in the list who were under surveillance between 2003-2008 by the NSA, FBI, and CIA. Based on a survey of 5 of the individuals targeted by the FBI, Greenwald somehow concludes that there's systemic targeting of Muslim Americans by both the FBI and NSA solely for their religious views. He gives a half-hearted guess as to why each of them might have been under investigation, but ultimately leaves it an open question. I think it's intentional - he wants you to walk away from the article thinking that because he didn't give a reason, there must not be one. Ultimately, we may never know - several others, however have given their own thoughts as to why[3][4].

> Another example of damage to US citizens is the use of purposefully backdoored services and infrastructure.

Could you provide an example of this? I think I know what you're getting at but I don't want end up assuming wrong, put words in your mouth and waste a lot of time ripping down a strawman.

> The broader point here is that the calculus of damage should not merely be about singular instances of damage today. It's a bad idea to build a nuclear reactor on a fault line. Not because it has already done damage. But because of the magnitude and the likelihood of what it may contrasted with alternatives.

But you don't just avoid building on a fault line because someone says it's a bad idea - you build elsewhere because there are certain standards for safety with regards to building nuclear reactors that have been agreed upon by experts who are intimately familiar with nuclear engineering, and a fault line doesn't meet the standards.

In my opinion, this is where the NSA issue really gets derailed. Most of the articles I've read will explain the technical capabilities of specific NSA programs without going into the policies that limit them. Snowden has stood up and said that so long as they have the technical ability to do something, you can't trust them to follow policy, but his disclosures have shown the NSA auditing their collection, bringing issues up to the FISA court, removing identifying information about US citizens from collection, etc. When no one was looking, they were following the law. If there's been a failure, it's been a failure of insufficient law and oversight.

And this is where I differ from most of the tech community. The solution isn't to take away technical capability because it could be abused in the future, it's to craft laws and policies to limit what the NSA can do with its technical capability and provide effective oversight. I don't think anyone from even before the Snowden disclosures has argued for less oversight.

As an analogy, the police have the technical capability to walk into every house on the city and shoot everyone inside. But they don't - it's both illegal and makes no sense in terms of law enforcement. For some reason, though, everyone seems to assume that given the fact that the NSA has enormous technical resources for gathering foreign intelligence that could be abused, without any further evidence to back up the claim they must also be carrying out the worst possible abuse and doing so for purposes that have nothing to do with foreign intelligence.

[1] http://www.grassley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/judiciary...

[2] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/09/under-surveill...

[3] https://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2014/07/09/misleadin...

[4] http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/071514-708936-snowd...