monitoring everything I do so why not let NSA have a crack at it.

The government can.

if the government wants me, they got me and whatever I post or blog will have nothing to do with it.

It would be extreme hubris to think that the NSA, or anyone else, listening to the conversations and tweets of millions of citizens would single out me for extinction. I'm just not that important. None of us are. Could some tyrannical empire eventually set up a spy and punish system to mold us all into their concept of model citizen/slaves? Yeah, but it ain't happening any time soon. (Except for North Korea who did it with no technology at all.)

Meanwhile, EVERYONE is being watched everywhere. I have a bigger problem with the thought of some asshole with google glasses or a cellphone camera and a Facebook wall catching me peeing in the parking lot.

is hardly a pifflefarting matter.

It would mean they have a warrant for you, and you w old have legal representation.

Concentrated power in the hands of either a public or private enterprise isn't good. That's where the right always goes wrong. They're always paranoid about government agencies but are seemingly dismissive of corporate interests when they do the same thing.The same goes with this sort of invasion of privacy and the glutenous appetite for our personal data by both corporations like Google and Facebook, as well as spy agencies like the NSA.

The issue isn't whether you're "important enough" or not. It's about such organizations having this much access without a legitimate need for it, either because they want to "market" crap to you, or because you're swept up in some far sweeping grab bag of meta data. The major difference however is that when you participate on a site like Facebook or Google, you are voluntarily ceding your privacy rights. We know cookies are used (though most of us don't know how necessarily). And ultimately they have no law enforcement power - unless of course they are actively cooperating with government officials. But when we speak on a cell phone, we don't expect the government to know the time, date, and numbers of those we called or received calls from. Unless they have a warrant, there is really no justification.

It's time for some real privacy laws being generated to stop this abuse by both spy agencies and tech companies.

Yet, my feelings are based on not liking it on principle, not because of some paranoid Orwellian fantasies.

All this paranoid bullshit coming form the FireDog-Left is utilizing logic that is fundamentally no different than that of the paranoid gun nuts who believe they NEED an arsenal for when the day comes that Uncle Sam Obama comes to abduct them and shove them into the FEMA death camps. We just aren't going to let it get that far and anyone with a grounding in reality would know that.

... the people won't band together and call a general strike, but the NSA will bring the country to a stop by shutting down big swaths of harmless internet users computers. Figures. Exponential Keystone Cops. I don't know why they hate this country so much.