Why NSA surveillance is worse than you’ve ever imagined

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/05/11/if-youre-not-outraged-about-the-nsa-surveillance-heres-why-you-should-be/

The Great Debate

Why NSA surveillance is worse than you’ve ever imagined

By James Bamford

May 11, 2015

Last summer, after months of encrypted emails, I spent three days in Moscow hanging out with Edward Snowden for a Wired cover story. Over pepperoni pizza, he told me that what finally drove him to leave his country and become a whistleblower was his conviction that the National Security Agency was conducting illegal surveillance on every American. Thursday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York agreed with him.
In a long-awaited opinion, the three-judge panel ruled that the NSA program that secretly intercepts the telephone metadata of every American — who calls whom and when — was illegal. As a plaintiff with Christopher Hitchens and several others in the original ACLU lawsuit against the NSA, dismissed by another appeals court on a technicality, I had a great deal of personal satisfaction.
It’s now up to Congress to vote on whether or not to modify the law and continue the program, or let it die once and for all. Lawmakers must vote on this matter by June 1, when they need to reauthorize the Patriot Act.http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/05/11/if-youre-not-outraged-about-the-nsa-surveillance-heres-why-you-should-be/