Shut it. Seriously. Shut your hole. You asked for this. You went along with this. You decided that THA TERRISS was scarier than Magneto, scarier than Darth Vader, scarier than the Mandarin multiplied by Voldemort. The New York Times broke this warrantless wiretap thing in December 2005, and you collectively yawned and rolled over. As a result, every single thing you are freaking about is 100% legal. No laws are being broken. You gave the government a free hand because you were gripped in pant-shitting terror, so it’s a bit rich to suddenly decide that this is some amazing scandal.
If you had a lick of sense, you’d recognize this: the things that the government is doing with Verizon, or Google, or Apple, or AT&T, or Facebook – these are not things that the government itself does. These are things these companies can do all by themselves. In fact, they’re the basis for the business model of Google and Facebook. So it’s not just the big bad evil government jackbooted thugs you should worry about. It’s every time you click “Agree” without bothering to read the text that nobody but an IP lawyer could make heads or tails of anyway. It’s every time you leave your privacy settings as default on every service.
This has been our life for a decade. Now that you’re paying attention, maybe we can start talking about what life looks in a big-data pervasive-surveillance state, and start talking less about what we can do with it and more about what we should.