IS ANYONE REALLY SURPRISED BY WHAT EDWARD SNOWDEN IS SAYING?

I am almost surprised that this former government employee is getting so much attention for what I have assumed our government has been doing for some time, and I never really thought it was a big secret. I just always felt it fell under the same banner our government has operated under, the basic “don’t ask what we do and we won’t tell you” policy that they have been using for many years.  I haven’t heard one piece of “new” news in all of the articles I have read about him, and unless he is leaking more information than I have read about on the internet there is nothing very precise or potentially harmful in any of the stuff I have read about his “telling” the world. When this supposed scandal broke I was expecting to read about how the government broke into people’s houses or something a little more serious than listening in to what all people should know is public information available on the internet from all the hacking that has gone on by private criminals and other countries spy organizations. His statement that “I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things… I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under” just says to me that he is an idiot if her ever thought that you can use public communication forums like cell phones and the internet without anyone listening in you. It has always been this way, nothing has changed other than almost everybody uses some of technologies these days. I have a hard time believing that I do anything the government has any interest in listening in on because I think they would get very bored in a very short time. I believe that the old rule of thumb that if you aren’t doing anything wrong you don’t have anything to worry about it pretty accurate. Given that the government is on somewhat legally shaky grounds on their public surveillance I am pretty confident that before our government acts on the information it gets by spying on us has to be pretty bad and pretty concrete before they are going to act on it. When I was a kid and telephones were land lines only, we had a party line, we were supposed to hang up the phone and not listen to someone else’s conversation when we picked up the phone and noticed someone was already on there but we didn’t always do that. I remember my girlfriend and I listening in to some very boring conversations that had our neighbors had with other neighbors and I have a feeling that is mostly what the government gets to listen to as well. There is nothing I say on the phone or the internet that anyone shouldn’t listen to other than the fact that what I put out there isn’t all that interesting!