We haven't actually been getting the data to make an informed decision on these, either. It took nearly a year to get any sort of numbers out of the government regarding how many people were being targeted[1] and they still haven't given any numbers on incidental collection. Meanwhile, most of the the media has been claiming that the communications of millions or even billions of people are being swept up, and now the Washington Post is actually looking at the data they've had for the last year and saying the number is more likely to be somewhere around 900k worldwide. I'm not saying that's necessarily a great number, but that's orders of magnitude less than what we've been led to believe. Nor does the article go into much detail on what "incidental" really means versus "targeted" - are these people in contact with the actual targets, or completely unrelated? Is there a better way to protect the privacy of these people without compromising actual intelligence operations? If not, which side should we err on, and how far?

These are tough questions to answer - especially without hard facts. It's hard to have an honest debate when we the people are left trying to discern the actual facts somewhere between the secrecy and sensationalism.

[1] http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/transparency/odni_transparen...