A friend of mine posed the question on facebook, (and I paraphrase) “Do people refrain from commenting on articles about Edward Snowden because they are afraid the NSA might be taking down names?”
It’s a legit question. I know there are a couple of topics I hesitate to comment on because of the backlash. If I see a ‘Jesus Loves You’ type post, I do one of two things. If I don’t know the person in real life, I just defriend them. If I do, I just ignore it. I have learned from experience (and some of us require more experience than others to learn this lesson) that there is really no point. 
But, that’s another topic. My position in favor of Snowden, Assange, Manning, Greenwald and anyone else releasing secret government files is well known. As long as governments have secrets, governments will start wars. As long as governments have secrets, they will steal from the people. As long as governments have secrets, there is nothing to stop them from doing whatever the hell they want and that just might include knocking down buildings when there are still a lot of people inside them.
But, I think the reason people don’t talk about these issues as much as they should (and we definitely don’t. If we were reacting to this as we should, we’d have burned the White House down. We’d have stormed the Capitol and be holding Congress hostage, with snakes.) is not fear. It’s resignation.
We know they are spying on everything. We know there is nothing we can do about it.
I take some solace in the fact that this massive amount of data, these random thoughts that are bouncing around the internet like popcorn, like pinballs, like a spray of rubber bullets in a concrete bunker are too numerous and diverse for the people of the NSA, no matter how numerous they are, to comprehend. They can hurt individuals in real space (Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange are definitely paying the price for us all) but they cannot stop The Thing. The internet, the hive mind that is emerging, is vast, complex, swiftly mutating, and ultimately democratic for better or worse. We cannot stop them from spying. We should flood them with brilliant repartee, great writing, beautiful pictures, amazing videos. Let them be buried in an avalanche of brilliance.
We can do that. There are enough of us.
www.gurukalehuru.com 
Hi, I’d take issue with the fact that there is nothing to be done about it. yes, people are reassigned, but it is more because they are comfortable and lazy, than because there is nothing to do. (Unless you are black in a town where the Pentagon has given the racist police military weapons that they have to use or give back). Even the NSA couldn’t stop 50 million people refusing to play the game, if they say blocked that many people from flying it would crush the airline industry.
Check out this documentary “I Am Fishead” made by a neighbor of mine. http://youtu.be/TB0k7wBzXPY Especially the last few minutes starting from 1:13:12 time mark. If enough people talk about it, write letters to congressmen, make it known that they are getting rebellious towards such spying, it can still change. In 1960, to most black people in the US it seemed utterly impossible that segregation would ever end in their life time. in 1990 in South Africa the same. The enemy is resignation.
What is insidious about what the NSA is doing, is that it is a slow creep, slowly boiling us in the changes like a frog in a pot. And Fox news and so on keeps spreading the message that if you don’t have anything to hide there is nothing to worry about, which just isn’t true.