>I said "dates back to high school." The 'dates back to' phrase, in general English, is a phrase that serves to establish the start of a time-lined pattern of behavior.

Again, this does nothing to establish why his behavior in high school is even remotely relevant to his behavior today - and even if it is, so what? He exposed the illegal behavior of the NSA because he's an attention whore? And that somehow invalidates the illegal-ness of what the NSA is doing?

The man could be a fucking sociopathic pedophile serial killer and it wouldn't matter. His personality has nothing to do with the content of the leaks. Repeat this sentence until it sinks in, please!

Why are you so hell-bent on ad-homming Snowden?

>Finding out information about someone is not hard, because the information is volunteered.

And those that are a little bit more careful? What about those edge cases? You know, and I know, and your bosses know, that it's not the people documenting their lives on Facebook that drives the NSA to backdoor encryption algorithms.

>NSA (as is my understanding) doesn't care about domestic information at all.

The content of the Snowden leaks proves this to be a a damn lie. Your understanding cannot compete with documents straight from the horse's mouth. Hell, you could be the director of the entire fucking department and it wouldn't matter - the facts disprove this narrative.

>Perhaps the smartest people employed by the DoD aren't any smarter than the people that frequent this site, and there are insanely large-scale peoples to be solved, and their fucking hard to solve?

The smartest people employed by the three letter agencies are beholden to the US constitution, something they apparently need reminded of.

If you're sucking up info from US citizens, that is not a "oops, let's get an intern to fix this broken footer" like it was a bug on some random rails site, that is a "you just broke the fucking supreme law of the land, please report to the DoJ for your inquiry"

>Do you really believe that the DoD cares about people that are not a direct threat to national security?

Everyone is a "threat to national security" until proven otherwise. Again, we have the authoritative leaks to go on, which rank about a million times higher than any apologia you can possibly offer.

And if they're not a threat to national security, then why are they in those databases? Search, seizure, and all that...

>Perhaps, unless you get a satellite phone call from Pakistan, you're not even interesting enough to get your area code noticed?

And yet, my shit is in their database. Why is that? What gives them the right?

>The government can hardly pass a damn budget. They're not that organized.

Because, yknow, the people responsible for passing a damn budget are the same ones that are responsible for orchestrating the SIGINT programs. Cmon, you know better than that. "The Government" is not a singular entity. This disorganized entity can apparently architect and effectively run programs such as PRISM, DISHFIRE, XKEYSCORE, and that operation that intercepts general purpose hardware to install backdoors who's name I can't remember right now.

Being a mess of bureaucracy and graft has never stopped any government, anywhere, from perpetrating massive crimes against its people. With that in mind, this is absolutely not a defense, nor even a mitigation, of the crimes committed.

I apologize if these posts come off as overly hostile, but you are making fallacious arguments, and you are handwaving inconvenient facts. It would be better for all concerned if you'd stop doing that.