Obama's Secret Terrorist-Tracking System, by the Numbers

While I share your dislike of the program, it's important to look at the overall scope rather just the government one. After all, you could build a pretty good automatic photo identification system on top of Facebook.

Hmmm, this seems like a pretty obvious vulnerability. When's the last time the CIA actually did something "secretly"? (Oooh, how would we know? Actually the last time they did something un-secretly was like a month ago, so there's a bound of sorts.) So if you do something to piss off the spooks in e.g. Russia or Israel, expect to be entered into their troll-the-CIA database, soon thereafter to be Hydra-ed into Obama's special uncategorizable tracking system.

But one good thing is (and I've said this before in relation to the whistleblowers) is that it will encourage more whistleblowers.

One of the apparent requirements for working at many of these 3 letter agencies is patriotism. If you show patriotism, you are a good candidate. They will spend money training you technical things, but they can't train you to be a patriot and love your country. The "problem" with such patriots is that they actually take to heart things like "Constitution", "Privacy", "Freedom" and so on. The hope of the agency is that with enough brainwashing and threats of loss of job, imprisonment, etc., these values would move to the background.

The "pragmatics" on top understand that those concepts are just there for propaganda. It is the sys admins and other mid-level analysts that might actually believe, and might just pull a Snowden so to speak once in a while.

NSA understood this and immediately went into self-preservation mode. They probably never even thought along the lines of "OMG we have let the public down, we have screwed up, etc etc.", rather they saw it as, we are not threatening and controlling our employees enough. So instead of spying less on our own citizens, we should institute "no-lone-zones" (like nuclear silos have), so you are together with an accountabil-a-buddy who is supposed to snitch on you if you do something silly.