It's pretty clear that the US government has become very comfortable using corporate entities to do their dirty work for them. This, along with agreements with foreign governments such as the Five Eyes Alliance, means the government has pretty much limitless power to ignore the spirit of any privacy law while still complying with the letter of the law.
Unfortunately many are fine with this because they believe it benefits their ideological group, which is more important than individual rights.
>...the FBI relied in some cases on emergency orders that do not require court authorization in order to quickly secure actual communications from people...
I remember back in the day when this would outrage people.
What really scares me is that it feels like in today's climate, the press would not even touch a story like the Snowden leaks. Not only that, but any outlet that did would be labeled as a spreader of misinformation, and banned.
After all, it's a conspiracy theory, which means it's verboten.
It’s not like the press really did all that much with Snowden. The few journalists that were involved haven’t exactly jumped in fame or popularity greatly. In fact, looking at Greenwald who was recently ousted out of the outlet he started, pretty much the opposite.
The press ran the story in my opinion half heartedly and imo forgave the transgressions because it was Obama in at the time. Most of the kick was directed right or wrong back to Bush.
It’s not like Brennan or Clapper or Rice or Yates ever faced even a degree of heat for directly lying to Congress about domestic spying.
I don’t at all disagree we live in a different world now, I just don’t have a perspective that this specific example was really that big at the time. Blurbs and tweets and Snowden Celebrity withstanding, the leaks had little to no actionable effect I can recall. I could be forgetting though.
["It's illegal to possess these stolen documents. It's different for the media. So everything you learn about this you're learning from us."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15ZTiAf8fp8)
Unfortunately many are fine with this because they believe it benefits their ideological group, which is more important than individual rights.