Where has he done this?

It'd be a huge improvement if the NSA had to go get a court order every time they wanted to read someone's e-mail (or whatever).

The biggest problem right now is that they're just sucking up everything they can get their hands on. That has to be stopped. Individual court orders are OK. Those are a normal part of police investigation and they're totally acceptable (assuming mostly functional courts of course).

Oh yes, in exactly the same way that an ice cube has something to do with heat.

I'd be a lot more threatened by your opinions if they'd ever shown a sign of involving any actual thought. As it is, they just seem to repeat whatever the intelligence state decided to try to throw out today.

"The Russians did it too." is not an excuse. Not that I'd expect any better from an NSA shill of course.

Friend, friends, ... Why all the fighting?
Can't he be an idiot and an asshole?

Pretty sure these traitors usually got a quaint little thing called a 'trial' where the prosecution used an outmoded idea called 'evidence' before the execution. (And if they didn't they were certainly supposed to.)

Amusingly, this is also just another restatement of the argument I was complaining about. "We used to be worse, so this is OK!". No it's bloody not!

[SARCASM] Yeah, it's been half a year since he exposed massive abuses of power in the US government. Can't he give it a rest already! [/SARCASM]

I'm getting seriously tired of the "We're not as bad as the Taliban/Russians/Chinese/Storm Troopers/..." argument.

You're supposed to be a whole lot better, not just slightly better!

Also, it's not a question of what could happen, it is happening. It's even happening to US citizens. Your government now asserts that it's allowed to arbirtarily kill its own citizens. I don't care how much worse someone else is. That's BAD.

A few points:

It turns out that (one of) the companies responsible for performing the background checks didn't actually do them (and not "failed once or twice", but "systematically faked them to increase their profit margins). There was a total failure on every level to provide any sort of auditing.

You assert damage, just like the US government has. Just like the US government you fail to provide any sort of evidence for this. In fact, there are reports that these programs are totally ineffective anyway. Any political damage from them happened because they existed, not because they are revealed in the same way (in exactly the same way, because that's what this is. A crime.) that prison time results from the crime, not from being caught.

Even if there was massive damage, the decision about wether or not we're willing to sacrifice essential freedoms (like not being watched 24/7) in return for (alleged) safety from terrorists is one which needs to be made by the people, in the open. Not by a secret court interpreting secret laws.

As others have said: "How so?"

It's a logical conclusion based on the available evidence: No safeguards were in place to defend against an analyst stealing data and giving it to someone else, despite this being an obvious threat the NSA could not possibly have been unaware of.

No such measures were taking until someone (i.e. Snowden) leaked this information to the public. Add this to the extremely negative way in which the NSA and the entire administration talks about journalists reporting on this, and the response to other whistleblowers and this really is the most likely explaination.

You don't seem to understand how a man in the middle attack works. They will insert themselves between the two ends of the conversation, and intercept everything, They'll decrypt it with their own private key, and reencrypt it with your public key. Unless you know the public key of the other party beforehand there's no way to defend against this. None if this is very hard if you own the phone network in between the two phones.