Snowdown worked on-site, not off-site and he wasn't working for the interests of his employer of record. Basically your entire point is hyperbole and that shit only hurts the cause. Quit it.

That was no secret at all. They don't need the NSA to figure out consumer profiles, there is already a billion dollar industry doing exactly that already. BlueKai, Facebook, Doubleclick, etc. There are hundreds of companies dedicated to figuring that stuff out based on credit-card usage, loyalty card usage, census data, voter registration records, purchasing history, salary history, etc.

Doing personal searches is not even in the same league as "total and full access." If you want to walk back the OP's claim to "on-site contractors could have abused their access to do unauthorized searches in individual cases," then I wouldn't be complaining. But "fotal and full access" is not even close to that - "total and full access" is the ultimate level of access it implies not only the full cooperation of the NSA it implies that the NSA's own access controls were deliberately out of the loop for these hypothetical companies use of the NSA's databases.

I am waiting for ANY proof that people off-site of the NSA's classified facilities had "total and full access" to any of the NSA's classified databases.

I disagree. I believe it has been reported that the NSA runs 20 million searches a month on the data they collect. That kind of volume makes it impossible to audit and even separation of duties isn't going to be feasible. It isn't like you can separate the guy who chooses what to search for from the guy who looks at the results. At best you could 2-man it, but even with that the volume would prevent the second man from being able to tell the difference between results personal to the 1st man and just a widely cast net.

Yes necessarily. Contract employees have exactly the same restrictions on them as direct employees. They go through all the same vetting processes to get a security clearance and they operate under the exact same rules. You migjht as well propose that corporations have moles in the ranks of the direct employees.

It isn't like the 2nd helicopter was only for the dog. It was carrying all the personnel and equipment that didn't fit in the first helicopter with the president.

If that's their plan, it is a stupid one. For most of the population spying on politicians and fat-cats is unrelatable. But having a lover break trust and spy on you is something just about everybody has experienced be it snooping through your phone, your email, or even just the stuff in your house.

One of the big reasons the public is apathetic to the NSA is that most people just don't see how it could ever affect them personally. With these revelations the NSA has made it crystal clear to the general public just how "icky" the NSA can be.

It might not be the best reason to be pissed off about the NSA, but it is the kind of thing that most people can immediately feel in their gut and that counts for a lot in this fight.

> Wasn't Snowden a corporate security contractor?

No, he was a contract employee. A "corporate security contractor" would be a company like Blackwater/Xe/Academi. The implication of the OP is that these private firms were able to request data from the NSA for their own purposes, not that people who worked for the NSA on contract did the same jobs as direct employees of the NSA.

I'm going to need a cite for that because I've been following this pretty closely and this is the first I've heard of private citizens having "total and full access" to the NSA's data.

> Wasn't the oversight supposed to prevent this?

Yes it was. According to the article most of these were only found out during un-related lie-detector sessions, not by any auditing system. It poses the question - how many other cases of abuse have slipped by because the employee knew how to fake out the lie detectors?

The projects I worked on called it a data diode.