In June of 2013, TV screens were filled with the image of an articulate young man in a hotel room in Hong Kong. He was telling us that the US government was monitoring what we did on the phone and on the internet. The National Security Agency (NSA), he said (transcript),
targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that’s the easiest, most efficient, and most valuable way to achieve these ends.