> Ironically, digging up someone's Internet post history and judging them on it is in part exactly what Snowden is trying to prevent the government from doing.
That's only true if you ignore the distinction between intentionally public posts and e-mails, phone calls, and other communications intended to be privately exchanged.
I suspect that there would be a lot less people upset about the NSA monitoring only intentionally public communications.
You have to believe they do monitor all public postings, though that is a job in itself. 2 thoughts about that:
1) they could probably justify secret rooms and data gathering on the volume of public traffic alone. In other words if they are hitting the public APIs millions of times a day, Twitter, FB, et al. Would rather give them privileged access. Then whoops, might as well read all the private stuff as well.
2) just imagine the power of analyzing topics, trends, and personalities on all public forums across the Internet, US and international! Google indexes it, but what if the NSA were able to make sense of it somehow. From usernames and posting profiles alone (and maybe language analysis) they might be able to bullied a DB of online personas. Of course, if they could read everybody's email or get IP addresses from servers and ISPs, then they could easily correlate with actual persons.
> You have to believe they do monitor all public postings
Naturally. I just don't believe that that's what the controversy is about, and that comparing searching through someone's public postings to the subject of the NSA surveillance controversy is missing the point of the controversy rather badly.
I absolutely agree that private communication is a whole different ball game.
That said, intentionally public communications, especially on a forum, are not a clear indication of a person's morality or what have you. The best example I can come up with is drawing parallels to a comedian's stand up routine.
That's only true if you ignore the distinction between intentionally public posts and e-mails, phone calls, and other communications intended to be privately exchanged.
I suspect that there would be a lot less people upset about the NSA monitoring only intentionally public communications.