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. I don't think you're doing it intentionally, and I may have poorly phrased my quick response, but I feel like you took my response quite a bit out of context. Everyone was trying to figure themselves out back in high school. I'm not judging that at all.

I can't speak to Clapper, only he can. I don't think its a far stretch of the imagination to say that there are far, far bigger things at play than his testimony. Have you ever visited the NSA museum? It's open to the public. The US actually intercepted the message the night before the Pearl Harbor attack happened, but didn't have the resources to decode it in time. (https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/museum/virtua... ctrl+f 'harbor' should be the 3rd/last result). The point being, perhaps there are bigger things at play.

I can't speak for my 'DoD friends' as you ask, mostly because they don't talk about the specifics of their work. I asked a buddy once if they monitor US citizens. He said something to the effect of: "we don't need to monitor people, they monitor themselves via facebook, twitter, and instagram. How hard do you think it is to find publicly available information?" After I was 'enlightened' to that, it made sense. People literally put what they cooked for dinner on the internet. Finding out information about someone is not hard, because the information is volunteered. No laws are broken, no rights are violated. If you care about your privacy, get off social media.

Also, as much as this may annoy you, NSA (as is my understanding) doesn't care about domestic information at all. That is the jurisdiction of the FBI. This is one of the things my friends find so amusing, people seem to not understand this. That being said, if a packet goes from DC to GA to CN to CA tp US, the foreign hop means: its not domestic traffic. As we have very recently seen, CN has very little issue mucking with traffic that crosses their direct sphere of influence. Perhaps its much harder to tell what kind of foreign traffic should be inspected, and maybe the initial location of origin was spoofed, and its not that easy to figure all this stuff out. 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?

I don't think you're going to like anything I've just said, but just think about it. Do you really believe that the DoD cares about people that are not a direct threat to national security? Do you really think the DoD has the resources to actually monitor, in real time, the general US population? Perhaps, unless you get a satellite phone call from Pakistan, you're not even interesting enough to get your area code noticed? The government can hardly pass a damn budget. They're not that organized. How many people lie on their tax returns every year and get away with it? If the government can't effectively audit the almighty dollar, do you really think they're Big Brother?

Edit: I can't edit my parent response, this is the best I can do. I am looking for a specific article that detailed Snowden from highschool up to his current life. I really will try my best to find this article, and will update as soon as I can find it. My 1 y/o daughter just went to bed, and I will quickly be following suit. I would honesly be willing to do some sort of silly HN-style AMA if people are interested. I'm not some internet troll. I went to Chesapeake High school, which is in the same athletic district as Arundel High school, Where Snowden went. I have no desire or reason to grandstand about anything.