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). These ideologically driven criminals (called terrorists) live hidden in the general public. Their identification is a main problem. This &quot;identification&quot; problem is what requires mass surveillance.<p>The terrorists are significantly different than many other criminals. In the sense that terrorists are not mainly driven by personal and earthly goals but they are driven by the goals set by their ideologies. 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>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. And the people who are criticizing US way too much should do themselves a favor by looking at countries run by tyrants like China, North Korea, most Islamist countries and Cuba. The way the Chinese government does the <i>mass surveillance</i> of its citizens on the Internet and the way the communists have installed the <i>reward&#x2F;punishment system</i> based on it will make you realize that what is happening in US is hardly even annoying.<p>I am not to say that US is innocent person but it has been receiving criticism way too much.<p>Edit: typo