I strongly suspect, that like most cops – they honestly believe they're "doing the right thing", and at the same time that "those laws don't apply to us while we're doing our job".
Having said that, as a "non-US person" it's been both a sobering realisation and an extended moment of "well _duh!_" in the wake of the Snowden revelations.
Part of me agrees that if _I_ were an American taxpayer, the NSA is doing exactly what they're paid for - invading non-US-citizens privacy on the grounds that maybe it'll help protect American interests.
Any expectation of "reasonable restraint" on their invasive prying is, in retrospect, completely foolhardy on my part.
Even expecting the US legal/political system to rein them in based on "fairness" or "good manners" or even "basic human rights" is also stupidly over optimistic.
The _only_ possible parties who might work in _my_ interests here, are organisations like the EFF (who I doubt have anything like the power needed to effect major change to organisations like the NSA, FBI, CIA, and FISA) - or businesses directly financially affected my loss of trust - Microsoft/Google/Yahoo/Facebook/Apple/Dropbox (the directly implicated PRISM participants) as well as less blatantly complicit but now highly suspect companies like Amazon, eBay/PayPal, Dell, HP, LinkedIn, Twitter, FourSquare, Instagram, Pintrest, all of whom I'd be foolish to assume haven't already caved to the sort of requests Lavabit refused to, and to a lesser but equally valid extent - any company hosting infrastructure in any of the Five Eyes nations. While I don't doubt that China, Germany, Brazil, Russia, and everybody else also have well funded agencies tasked with invading the privacy of their non-citizens (as well as their own citizens to a greater or lesser degree), it's likely that Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and The UK all have access to the tools and expertise of what's likely to be the most advanced digital attacker on the planet.
My personal goal now is to reduce my reliance on US and Five Eyes based internet companies, both directly financially where I'm paying for the service, and all the indirectly financial ways I allow them to monetize me - hello adblock, hello no-script, hello self destructing cookie addon, helle better privacy addon (and goodby LSO cookies), hello private browsing windows everywhere… As somebody who uses Google Analytics extensively at work, I _hate_ it when people do exactly what I'm doing - but financially hitting the only organisations with any power to change domestic US policy to better align with my interest is the only sensible option I have. (Coupled, of course, with implementing/promoting strong crypto, secure anonymity, and internet service and protocols that make metadata and network analysis much less useful and as resistant as possible to the massive-scale "hoover up everything on the backbones" type surveillance we now know is already happening.)
For sure - and a great many celebrated entrepreneurs, startup founders, and fortune 500 C*Os…
I suspect many of us are somewhere on that spectrum between Scott F Fitzgerald's "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.", and George Orwell's Doublethink: "The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them..."
(For me, I feel most deeply my own hypocrisy about traffic laws - while on my motorcycle on empty backroads, "those speeding laws don't apply to me!" while taxi drivers failing to indicate and running red lights around town deserve the full force of _those_ laws, of course… I sometimes suspect I'd be a lot wealthier if I channeled that personal hypocrisy along a more Zuckerbergian or AirBNB-like YCombinator-approved "ask for forgiveness later" attitude towards other company's terms of service – instead of just feeding my own adrenaline addiction…)
Having said that, as a "non-US person" it's been both a sobering realisation and an extended moment of "well _duh!_" in the wake of the Snowden revelations.
Part of me agrees that if _I_ were an American taxpayer, the NSA is doing exactly what they're paid for - invading non-US-citizens privacy on the grounds that maybe it'll help protect American interests.
Any expectation of "reasonable restraint" on their invasive prying is, in retrospect, completely foolhardy on my part.
Even expecting the US legal/political system to rein them in based on "fairness" or "good manners" or even "basic human rights" is also stupidly over optimistic.
The _only_ possible parties who might work in _my_ interests here, are organisations like the EFF (who I doubt have anything like the power needed to effect major change to organisations like the NSA, FBI, CIA, and FISA) - or businesses directly financially affected my loss of trust - Microsoft/Google/Yahoo/Facebook/Apple/Dropbox (the directly implicated PRISM participants) as well as less blatantly complicit but now highly suspect companies like Amazon, eBay/PayPal, Dell, HP, LinkedIn, Twitter, FourSquare, Instagram, Pintrest, all of whom I'd be foolish to assume haven't already caved to the sort of requests Lavabit refused to, and to a lesser but equally valid extent - any company hosting infrastructure in any of the Five Eyes nations. While I don't doubt that China, Germany, Brazil, Russia, and everybody else also have well funded agencies tasked with invading the privacy of their non-citizens (as well as their own citizens to a greater or lesser degree), it's likely that Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and The UK all have access to the tools and expertise of what's likely to be the most advanced digital attacker on the planet.
My personal goal now is to reduce my reliance on US and Five Eyes based internet companies, both directly financially where I'm paying for the service, and all the indirectly financial ways I allow them to monetize me - hello adblock, hello no-script, hello self destructing cookie addon, helle better privacy addon (and goodby LSO cookies), hello private browsing windows everywhere… As somebody who uses Google Analytics extensively at work, I _hate_ it when people do exactly what I'm doing - but financially hitting the only organisations with any power to change domestic US policy to better align with my interest is the only sensible option I have. (Coupled, of course, with implementing/promoting strong crypto, secure anonymity, and internet service and protocols that make metadata and network analysis much less useful and as resistant as possible to the massive-scale "hoover up everything on the backbones" type surveillance we now know is already happening.)