What did Edward Snowden get wrong? Everything [View all]

[Just Saying]

Let me break this to you gently. The government is not interested in your conversations with your aunt, unless, of course, she is a key terrorist leader. More than 100 billion emails were sent every day last year — 100 billion, every day. In that vast mass of data lurk a few bits that are of urgent interest and vast terabytes of tedium that are not. Unfortunately, the metadata (the phone numbers, length of contact, and so forth, but not the content of the conversations) that sketch the contours of a call to your family member may fall into the same enormous bucket of information that includes information on the next terrorist threat. As Jeremy Bash, the former chief of staff of the CIA, memorably put it, "If you're looking for a needle in the haystack, you need a haystack."

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0811-liepman-snowden-and-classified-informat-20130811,0,2610260.story

LA Times opinion piece from former CIA and deputy director of National Counterterrorism Center. A good read with some interesting points.