By informing the public, via this newspaper, of a specific program, and of its widely used commercial targets like Facebook and Google, he has confirmed that the security state that exists inside the United States continues to metastasize – in a way that seems relevant to the lives of ordinary citizens. Oddly, the banality of the Powerpoint form, with its sentence fragments and terrible graphics, served to render the program much more real than hearing from an ATT employee that the NSA was recording American’s phonecalls wholesale.
- – Clay Shirky, The Guardian, here
