re: #73 engineer cat

tend to overshadow the fact that 1) the legal requirements have become incredibly relaxed,

The FISA oversight process under the Obama Administration is actually more restricted than the process in effect under the Bush Administration. There’s more oversight now, though the question can be phrased as to whether still more oversight or restriction is needed, even as the fact remains that an individual warrant is needed for the NSA to target US citizens, or people inside the US.

As to your point two:

and 2) the vastly increased availability of personal information invites abuse by people not following the law

That applies to both businesses and the government. After all, businesses have shown a willingness to do with private data whatever they damned well please - Facebook and others are constantly looking to monetize personal information and interactions by any means necessary. And we (as a whole) seem to ignore what kind of privacy we give up when sharing on Facebook and other social networking sites.