&gt; I guess, the Snowden incidence is being used to hurl undue venom towards USA. But these people are ignoring or deliberately misleading other people to ignore the real dangers posed by extremists (including Islamists, communists, the far right Christians and so on).<p>Yeah, well, I don&#x27;t think Cuban or North Korean spies are really at the forefront of anyone&#x27;s concerns (apart from South Korea and Japan).<p>&gt; Thus terrorism (inspired by hate ideology or religion) is significantly different in a very important respect from other crimes; that is, the terrorist(s) generally find support and shelter amongst large number of otherwise normal citizens inspired&#x2F;driven by the hate ideology or religion whereas a murderer or a pedophile generally doesn&#x27;t find such shelter.<p>Funny how pedophile rings are regularly dismantled (and made of &quot;otherwise normal citizens&quot; in majority). As for the &quot;wolf in sheep&#x27;s clothing&quot; thing, it&#x27;s not necessarily true (look at the profile of the attackers in France and Belgian, most of whom were linked to petty criminality - not to mention the guy who <i>actually went to Syria</i>).<p>&gt; Tell this Snowden to do (or at least talk) a little bit about the dire situation of people&#x27;s freedom in the country he has chosen to flee to, namely, Russia.<p>It was only a choice in the sense that the alternative was &quot;kidnapping by the CIA&quot;. Russia was way down in Snowden&#x27;s list of countries to flee to. What you don&#x27;t seem to realize is that even if it&#x27;s not abused <i>now</i>, it could very well be abused <i>tomorrow</i>. You want a Donald Trump nominating one of his cronies at the head of the US intelligence services and starting to dig into untold amounts of already-recorded communications?<p>And it&#x27;s not only the US. Us Europeans are doing exactly the same thing, just with less money. The potential of it being abused by organizations which by their very nature have little to no external oversight (or by their political masters) is absolutely frightening. And that&#x27;s compounded by the panopticon effect: if you&#x27;re never sure of how much you&#x27;re being watched, you will self-censor.