A political decision has been made not to irritate the intelligence community. The spy agencies are really embarrassed, they're really sore - the revelations really hurt their mystique. The last ten years, they were getting the Zero Dark Thirty treatment - they're the heroes. The surveillance revelations bring them back to Big Brother kind of narratives, and they don't like that at all.
Edward SnowdenA child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalysed thought. And that's a problem because privacy matters, privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.
Edward Snowden