I think that if you really look at ideas and thought processes, you don't really come up with them. They occur and you then perceive them. They certainly aren't conscious. I think it was in a Sam Harris book or lecture where he references brain imaging studies that show that the decision is made _before_ the person is consciously aware of it. The researchers can point to when the idea/decision occurs before the subject is aware of it himself. Where is the free will here?

From what I've read, the legal argument against this being an illegal search is that the entire dataset isn't searched, it is stored. They store the communications. When they want access to the data on a particular person they get a search warrant to access the stored data. I don't agree with that, but that seems to be the theory.

Here is a short video on an NSA whistleblower about the Utah datacenter and the types of things they can do with that much data.

Where, exactly, are you injecting your heroin?

On a lot of email providers have security questions. Click the handy "I forgot my password" link and they ask

1) Mother's Maiden Name
2) FIrst Pet
3) Name of your high school

or whatever other type of information that would be reasonably difficult to find out WITHOUT the internet but is trivial with it, even for non celebrities. For celebrities...

Right. The freedom to modify. The freedom to have the code so you can change the software to do things you want and to stop doing the things you don't want. As long as THAT freedom is there, this is a side issue.

Do I want my local searches going to the net? Nope. Still isn't a free software issue. RMS is arguing from an ideological point of view...but its not the FSF's main ideological point of view.

I've never actually wished I had mod points before.

Bravo.