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I definitely agree with the notion that privacy in this day and age is defined with different terms compared to those of the past, particularly before the age of electronics. In the past if you were to send a letter, for example, you would have been able to tell if it had been opened, thus being able to immediately tell when your privacy had been breached. Now in this day and age there are several people that would tape over the camera of their personal laptop, insisting that even if no one was watching through the camera that one could never be too careful. This sense of being watched and monitored is a constant thought that seems very plausible, and the purpose of it could also be for several reasons; for commercial and marketing purposes, tracking our pattern of consumer goods in order to follow the trend in the market and supply it; for security reasons, looking for certain high risk words used in the databases and zero-in on the producer. Whatever the cause, the argument is the same, there is an ever watchful waking eye that could be silently perusing our livelihoods. This metaphor reminds me of the story “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe. The main character describes the ever watchful eye of his elder companion as “the eye of a vulture” and decides to get rid of the man in order to “rid myself of the eye forever.” This fear and loathing for an ever watchful presence is thus the same in reaction, nobody would like their privacy to be encroached, no matter how minute it could be, and in order to be rid of it one could turn to drastic measures in order to be rid of it forever. Therefore the reaction Mr. Snowden had regarding the intelligence he was in possession of was comprehensible to some degree.

To echo what Professor Hamilton put forward, I believe there is a fine line between a government spying on its citizens for the purposes of national security (whatever that means) and overt invasions of privacy for the purposes of corporate profit and more. I too, on many occasions, have found dubious "coincidences" with respect to marketing on my email and Facebook accounts and have since steeply curbed the personal information I offer online.

That said, intelligence agencies such as the NSA and CIA have unimaginable influence and scope and I find it hard to believe there would ever be any change in their surveillance conduct regardless of public opinion on the matter. In this technological age, every aspect of one's personal life can be extracted and exposed if it is a government agency's desire to do so, and there is very little that can be done to counteract this reality. The case of the NSA is an undeniably egregious invasion of the public's privacy as well as a glaring constitutional infraction (if that even means anything anymore). It would be naive to think exceedingly powerful entities like the American government and their associated agencies play by the same rules as its citizens and operate with a modicum of integrity - they are simply a product of the greedy, power-hungry political structure we are all a part of. I certainly have not lost faith in humanity, as I believe there is just as much good in the world as there is evil. However, if the overarching paradigm of endless profit-seeking and domination remains intact, the government's status quo will remain unchanged, and these violations of privacy will continue.