In spite of your love affair with snowden and hated of child fjord, the espionage in most of these cases really is not the real problem. All countries really do do it. And even though it is popular to bash the US they really do put a lot more restraints on themselves than most other countries. Most of this is just convenient political posturing.It is kind of amazing the number of "leaks" from other countries doing the exact same stuff. E.g. the NSA did not spy on EU citizens, their own counties did, and then blamed the NSA.

Blaming the NSA for doing what it's political masters tell it to do is like blaming a gun for shooting something.

Snowden may be many things, but a whistle blower he is not. If that is what he is, then he could have stopped at the call metadata and prism. I do not understand how talking about us spinning on foreign governments is any thing but being a traitor. It is hard to take his rants about the US being the worst spying country in the world as he gets handled by the FSB.

If you actually take the time to look at some of the material that has been published and ignore the hype people like greenwald put in to push their point of view rather than report on what is actually there you would actually see a lot more protections and checks than is being reported generally. Also it is amazing how often after some sensational article comes out, when it gets more scrutiny it turns out to not really be all that damming. Probably the most telling thing is that even with people going out of their way to look for evil intent they have so far only shown the possibility of abuse, not the actual large scam systematic abuses everyone worries about. Yes, there appears to be some large scale collection programs, but in today's world it does not seem like there is any way to do intelligence gathering any other way. This is not the 40s where every phone call occurred on its own individually hand switched circuit anymore. And phone calls now are really just a minor part of what is going around.

Now that you have gotten done feeling superior, how do you explain the fact the EU citizens that where spied on by the US had their info given to the NSA by their own intelligence agencies?

Actually over classification is a federal crime. The same law that set out the classification levels etc also made it illegal to knowing over classify material simply to keep it out of the public eye. Now that aside I still feel from what I know what Manning did was wrong and he should be punished to the full extent of the law.

What do you propose then? Historically defense has been where any number of the innovations we currently take for advantage came from. It is often times extremely hard to value what they produce, especially from highly secretive portions of it, but they are there. The NSA has been working with colleges for years to beef up their security education. Now they probably only get a fraction of the graduates that go through these programs. How do you think the companies that get the remainder feel about getting developers that better understand how to create secure systems and software? How does that benefit the economy? While some of the cyber issues may be over hyped, I do not think to many people will disagree that we can do a hell of a lot better. How often do we hear about companies getting broken into or attacked? I also do not think there is really any group with as enough influence and resources to get us on better footing the the Federal Government. In order for that to happen they have to make a major investment, hence what is going on in this article.