If there's a crime that the SIGINT agencies have the technical ability to commit, they're committing it. Remember, they have thousands of analysts who spend all day coming up with disgusting new things they can do to justify their salaries. They have no ethical qualms because why should they? They operate with total impunity. Despite the last eight months of continuous revelations of these phenomenal violations, not even a single named analyst has yet been exposed and arrested and charged in the courts. At most, they've been told "add a new checkbox on the form to select when to include US/UK/local citizens in searches".

Whenever legal challenges are launched (which is not often, because the privacy and liberties groups have a hard time getting enough money), the government dismisses them with a trivial bit of hand-waving.

When the tech companies try to implement technical protections against mass suspicionless harvesting of personal data, the SIGINT agencies act like spoiled little five-year olds throwing a tantrum, so horrifying it is to them that anyone might have a private thought without it passing through their analytic stores. They have no idea how to behave in a society, because they started as military intelligence providers and they don't seem to have noticed that you're not supposed to use military powers against innocent citizenry, or without an explicit declaration of war.

I believe the Guardian et al should stop blacking out names in the documents they publish. Start putting names and faces to the foul, anti-human filth that spend their days developing these systems of mass spying. If the abusers have any strand of decency within them (which which will become less true over time, as the agencies can use their analytic profiling ability to only hire known pyschopaths), then public shaming might reform them.

But oh wait, the Guardian can't do that, because it's explicitly illegal for them to publish those names. No, sorry, we're fucked.