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We haven’t been duped. Snowden did a lot of good waking people up. The other stuff? I’m sure countries know each other’s secrets with or without Snowden.

An early 1980's book called The Puzzle Palace detailed much of the NSA's very broad collection of communication both foreign and domestic. This has gone on, has and been accelerating since the NSA's founding. On top of that, because of rapidly advancing information technology, it has become incredibly cheap and easy to collect, organize and search this information.

Because of the above, none of Snowden's revelations were the least bit surprising to me. In fact, I suspect that the collection is much deeper, going beyond metadata to full content. It would not cost all that much more to do so, and it would use the same sort of existing collection points and taps, only well upgraded.

There may be a legal argument that the mere automated collection of bulk domestic communications is not a violation of the 4th Amendment so long as the constitutionally protected portions are not examined without a warrant. The NSA is probably very unwilling to make such arguments as they would have to fess up to all the bulk collection.

The NSA and USA probably do this sort of collection best today, but you can bet that every government on earth with an intelligence budget is doing the same, only with fewer protections for their citizens and none for you.

Certainly Snowden is far more thoroughly spied on today by Russian intelligence than he ever was by the NSA.

>> We haven’t been duped <<

Using a common sense definition of the term, I’d say a “dupe” is somebody who doesn’t realize he has been duped.