When the story first came out about the NSA leak my initial reaction was positive toward the whistle-blowing. Now that some data have been released I'm not so sure.
This morning's news had an item saying that Facebook, in the last half of 2012 was asked for information on 10,000 of their clients. Hmmmm. Given the vast size of the worldwide Facebook community, 10 grand is a minuscule number. Even if the request was limited to America, it hardly qualifies as little more than noise in the system.
Extrapolating that number to have the same request made of 100 organizations, and still staying within U.S. borders, it's only 1 in 3,000,000 people - hardly the picture being painted where all citizens must worry about every email and phone call.
I don't know what the figures are in terms of the number of terrorist activities thwarted as a result of the NSA spying but, even if it's just a few, it doesn't sound to me like a giant trade-off.
We all wander the web knowing that cookies are planted on our drives specifically to track us and build profiles on us, and we all sign up to various sites giving away personal information at the same time. Is it logical to think that the NSA activity is really more nefarious - particularly in light of the security objectives?
