Snowden: NSA employees routinely pass around intercepted nude photos

[Pholus]

84. Well I presume to. They have no baseline for trust.

1) It was always about more than metadata (http://www.propublica.org/article/nsa-data-collection-faq)

2) The NSA spies on Americans outside their mandate (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/05/the-nsa-is-giving-your-phone-records-to-the-dea-and-the-dea-is-covering-it-up/).

3) They play word games with "laws" by childishly redefining terms to that they have meanings other than the common ones (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/director-national-intelligences-word-games-explained-how-government-deceived).

4) After years of lying through their teeth about "good network security is a national interest, so we're here to help" it turns out that they were hoarding vulnerabilities and hell, for good measure putting a few more in there. (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-11/nsa-said-to-have-used-heartbleed-bug-exposing-consumers.html AND http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/20/us-usa-security-rsa-idUSBRE9BJ1C220131220 )

I think you are hard pressed to demonstrate that this group is more than a bunch of pimply faced script kiddies trying to protect their bloated budget and future lucrative consulting contracts -- as bad as the russian cybercriminals when it comes down to it. Hell, worse, because I am paying them to attack my networks and my data security.

At its core the NSA is an organization to protect American citizens using unamerican tactics. During the cold war they managed a degree of professionalism, but "after the gloves came off" it obviously descended into lord of the flies. Opportunistic neocons took over as the cold warriors got shut out and look at the bullshit they started. Time to clean their house and cut their budget so they regain a sense of priorities.

I believe you probably need to defend the premise that they deserve any latitude at this point.