> The difference is that police and military have very well-defined protocols for oversight, carried out mostly in the open, with multiple authorities being involved and clear chains of responsibility.

So does the NSA through both the FISC court and the Congressional Intelligence and Judicial Committees. As much as people like to gloss over them and brush them off as rubber stamps, if you actually read the released FISC opinions you'd see there was a good deal of pushback (see [1] as an example of the NSA overstepping their bounds and being forced to stop by the court). Likewise, you can look at the in-fighting between Sen Feinsein and former Sen Rogers on one side with Sen Wyden and former Sen Udall on the other. Right now we also have a major disagreement between the Judges on the FISC and the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals on the legality of the phone records program, which likely won't be resolved unless the law is renewed and it's appealed to the Supreme Court.

There is oversight. Yes, it is done in secret for the sake of protect intelligence sources, but it does in fact exist. And, frankly, I think the Snowden disclosures themselves show that they largely work. Before the Church/Pike reforms back in the 70s, the NSA was specifically targeting anti-war protesters, civil rights activists and even congressmen[2]. Now, despite his best efforts, Greenwald has yet to show evidence of a single American that was targeted by the NSA.

> Do you think cracking Google networks and the likes were "legitimate actions"?

I would probably be really pissed off if that's actually what they did. I'm assuming you're referring to this[3], in which the authors start off trying to suggest that the NSA is breaking into Google and Yahoo data centers, but when you read further and look at the source documents it becomes apparent that what was actually happening was that Google and Yahoo were sending their international data-center traffic across the globe unencrypted, and GCHQ was picking it up on one of their fiber taps. Now stop and consider that every other country that those leased fiber lines passed through was probably doing the exact same thing. I don't see this as NSA abuse, I see this as Google getting caught not protecting its customers' information.

And in line with my complaint in my above comment, the article finishes with "It is not clear how much data from Americans is collected and how much of that is retained." So what kind of data is collected? Who is being targeted? Why are they being targeted? What is the data being used for? Am I being targeted? Are other Americans being targeted? The article doesn't answer any of these questions, nor does it give me any indication as to who else might be listening in and what data they're collecting.

If the NSA is using that access to gather information on, say, Russian targets, I don't care - good for them. If the NSA was using that access to collect data on the Russian government, and now that intelligence source has dried up, then the Washington Post has just done disservice to the American people. If the NSA is using it to collect American data, or if the Russians are listening in on American communications using similar techniques, now that's newsworthy.

[1] http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/08/the-nsa-documents-part-ii...

[2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/09/25/secret-cold-war-documen...

[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-in...