I have real issues with the insanely thorough and ever-expanding spying being perpetrated against the average citizens of the world. Consider:

The NSA stores metadata from half a billion telephone calls, emails, and text messages in Germany alone every month.

In direct violation of the law, France has been revealed to have been intercepting and storing most of that nation’s internal Internet and phone communications for years. The NSA is said to have obtained over 70 million phone records on French citizens in a single 30 day period.

The “Fairview” program is being used by the NSA to spy on the communications of Brazilian citizens.

Direct access to monitor communications lines has been given to the British spy agency GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) by Verizon, Vodaphone, and BT.

The NSA has cracked numerous forms of encryption used by private citizens and is planting back doors into consumer products with the help of the tech industry, often through the use of malware and outright theft of keys.

Most major smartphones are now able to be tapped into by the NSA. These devices contain a world of information on many of us, from our personal correspondence to where we happen to be at any moment. We help make this form of surveillance possible because we want the convenience offered by this technology.

Google and Yahoo have had their unencrypted data center communications intercepted by the NSA, allowing almost full access to whatever these companies store in “the cloud” on our behalf.

I could go on; there are many more revelations, but the point has been made. Everyone is affected at some point. And everyone should feel violated.

While we share in the outrage, we don’t share in the surprise.