By the way Joe, I suggest that you familiarize yourself with the Indian outsourcing business. Practically every large corporation has significantly outsourced large amounts of their IT work to these off shore organizations. They have people who are more sly and brilliant than snowden. These people will have access to all of the personal information that you hold so dear.

Beyond that, these Indian programmers also write much of the software that runs the computer systems. SOP it would be trivial for them to install some sort of backdoor access during the develpment provcess. So once agian you got people with access to your private data,

And only recently we have learned that the Syrian Army has hacked the web site of the NY times. The Chines army has hacked into most aspects of our coporations and national security apperatus. Russian mofia hackers are apparently quite talented to get what they want ... with few scruples.

I am not sure what "privacy" that you think you have, but IMO that idea is a delusional what ever happens with NSA databases.

But, you can take steps to protect yourself, I hear that the first and most important step is to start wearing a tin hat.... just in case the government has figured aout a way to tap directly into your brain.

And, as far as torture is concerned.... if the Mexican drug lords wanted to extract any information from you.... they could find you and use their own brand of "enhanced interrogation"

so once again I am not sure how much added protection you will get from protecting yourself from the possibility that the NSA might have torture on their agenda for you.

"It's not a lie if you believe it." -- George Costanza
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves. --Bertrand Russel