NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide

Are there literally no limits worldwide to their power at this point?

It is my current assumption that everything now is being logged.

Meanwhile, most of your neighbors are focused on their own lives, and the lives of the people they'd rather watch on TV.

That roof IS going to collapse. Its just a matter of when. Would you too not have contempt for the priorities of your neighbors?

By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot.

There's a problem with this. The Post goes into a good amount of detail regarding how the NSA/GCHQ is collecting, but leaves nothing but speculation as to who they're targeting or why. It even goes so far as to suggest that NSA/GCHQ is targeting millions upon millions of ordinary citizens without giving evidence to back up that assertion. I would argue that these media outlets are doing us a disservice by not providing this information. All they're doing is generating hype and fear. I'm scrolling through the comments here and seeing calls for the imprisonment (or worse) of Obama administration officials and NSA personnel based not on solid evidence that the public at large is being spied upon, but based on our fear that the public is being spied upon. Some hypothetical headlines as an analogy:

A: "SWAT team guns down local residents"

B: "SWAT team guns down unarmed retirement home residents"

C: "SWAT team guns down pair of local gunmen; ends killing spree"

Headline A is vague and misleading. If that was the entirety of the information put out, the public would be outraged. If the actual story was closer to headline B, they'd be rightfully outraged, and all trust in the police force would be rightfully gone. The outrage wouldn't be justified if the actual story was closer to headline C. With regards to today's story, I don't want see something like "NSA spies on Google traffic" - there's not enough context. I want to see evidence showing who they're targeting and why. If it turns out that they're spying on US Congressmen, major business executives or just ordinary Americans with the intent to blackmail/bribe/manipulate/etc. - that's the reason to call for these people to stand trial. If it turns out that they're spying on the unencrypted internet traffic of valid intelligence targets like foreign government officials/foreign spies/terrorists/etc., what has the public gained by telling us all how they're doing it?

The media needs to show us that there's a good reason to be afraid/outraged of a vast, covert Orwellian apparatus, then show us how to protect ourselves against it. Show us that the NSA is determined to undermine the public good for its own benefit. Unless there is no vast, hidden Orwellian state. Every Snowden document that gets released without showing evidence that the NSA is pursuing anyone besides those it has been tasked to pursue leads me to believe more and more that there is no such evidence, and the media is riding high on all of this fear and outrage to gather advertising dollars.

I know I feel a bad gut reaction to the mass collection of data, but when you think about it that is exactly what a country wants from its spy agency, to know others' secrets. Hence they're doing the most optimal thing from the countries point of view. Therefore it is just the brazen scale, the automation of the whole operation, and the fact that it is now officially public that gives me (and us in general) the sick feeling.

Like the breakdown of forgetting (anything on the Internet is there forever), and the rapid dissemination of information through the social network (Facebook status etc), an adjustment needs to be made either in us or the system.