No. This is a "foreign policy" issue and that barely makes it onto the voters' radar when the "foreign policy" issue is an ongoing war. That, and the election is still 3 years out.

I wouldn't even hold my breath about voters caring during next year's midterm.

Physicists are both alive and dead between paychecks.

No, getting caught is bad for business. Some of the ways that cooperation and collaboration is rewarded (e.g. trade secrets) are quite good for business, which is why nobody made a stink about this before these revelations became public.

Could have left the headline at that.

So we as good little citizens are supposed to help the NSA "find a better way" to "connect all the dots," but they have no idea what to do even when all the "dots" are in their physical possession?

Maybe if they spent more time monitoring and logging their own systems everyone would be better off.

My mobile carrier is AT&T. The NSA doesn't need to break the encryption.

First off, considering the degree of collaboration we've seen, I'd say that the hurting (if any) has been more than fair.

But what really bothers me is that this is all that matters here. It's not that there's blanket spying going on, it's that the revelation is hurting the bottom line of some major campaign contributors. No violin is too tiny for AT&T!

Asking for "a better way to do X" presumes that X should be done to begin with.

"Help us find a better way to torture prisoners!"

Naturally the Senate didn't challenge him on this presumption just as it didn't hold him accountable for lying to them to begin with.

But if people can't make phone calls from airplanes, how can the NSA listen into them?

The only space-faring plumbers we have spend most of their time saving princesses.

"Mr. Gorbachev, gradually reduce the height of this wall over the coming years and decades!"

Funny how Ronald "Southern Strategy" Reagan only appeals to gradualism in this instance.

Mortgage-backed securities!

I feel more confident already!

And if a doctor is asked to treat a tortured prisoner so that they may be healthy enough to be tortured more?

But DARPA pie-in-the-sky projects are but a drop in the bucket compared to the budgets and industries involved directly in "designing a missile system to kill lots of brown people on the other side of the world," including the number of engineers employed.

And you and your customers always agree who the "bad guy" is in all situations? Or do you try to avoid asking too many questions (and all mention of Wikileaks)?

And does your employer only sell weapons to customers you are morally comfortable with, or do those weapons end up being sold to just about anybody the government wants to placate at the moment?

Can you guarantee that the weapons you're designing are being deliberately used to threaten someone else's sleeping baby girls, if not your own outright?