Where you go, what you watch, text and share, with whom you speak, all your internet searches and preferences, all gathered and “vertically integrated,” sold to police and perhaps, in the future, to any number of AT&T’s corporate customers.

Unrestrained power may be many things, but it’s not American. It is in this sense that the act of whistleblowing increasingly has become an act of political resistance. The whistleblower raises the alarm and lifts the lamp, inheriting the legacy of a line of Americans that begins with Paul Revere.

The morning after final passage of the USA Freedom Act, while some foes of mass surveillance were celebrating, Thomas Drake sounded decidedly glum. The new law, he told me, is “a new spy program.” It restarts some of the worst aspects of the Patriot Act and further codifies systematic violations...

It is one thing for the U.S. and Israel to spy on each other. It is another thing for Israel to steal U.S. secrets and play them back to U.S. legislators to undermine U.S. diplomacy.

Private apologies are not enough for a defender of torture, the architect of America’s drone program and the most talented liar in Washington. The nation’s top spy needs to go.

Did Secretary of State Clinton know that such massive spying on the American people was going on and, if not, why isn’t she grateful that Snowden helped to enlighten her? With her scurrilous attacks on Snowden, Hillary Clinton is either a fool or a liar.

Now outraged that the CIA may have spied on her committee's work, this is the same senator who could not empathize with Americans upset at the revelations in the Snowden documents of millions of citizens whose personal data has been accessed by the NSA

Now outraged that the CIA may have spied on her committee's work, this is the same senator who could not empathize with Americans upset at the revelations in the Snowden documents of millions of citizens whose personal data has been accessed by the NSA.

Members of Congress are finding themselves at an ever-increasing disadvantage when it comes to even finding out what intelligence agencies are doing — not to mention reining them in.

              The Editorial Board The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/02/opinion/edward-snowden-whistle-blower.html?ref=opinion&_r=1& Seven months ago, the world began to learn the vast scope of the National Security Agency’s reach into the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the United States and around the globe, as it collects...