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"Targeting ordinary germans, by the hundreds of millions"
Germany has a population of 80 million. Way not to sound hyperbolic, Greenwald. Alright, gonna watch rest of video now.

Also, not gonna go all live-commenting here, but Greenwald notes the difference in reaction to surveillance of Merkel and to politicians vs the german public, there is an obvious difference: it goes without saying that the NSA is not actually listening to every german personally, but that this sort of thing is done to snap up conversations of interest. But targeting politicians is a completely different form of surveillance, where the privacy of the individual is being mapped and all their communication noted (probably) iow, theres a difference between having parts of your communications (among millions of individuals and billions of messages) potentially being snapped up, and being under constant surveillance, as in a specific target. And when that target is a democratically elected leader, the problem is even bigger.

It doesn't go without saying; you missed the point about metadata being the most important element they are gathering.

He was referring to the hundreds of millions of connections that the NSA was reported to be spying on every month. It was the first of a series of articles based on documents provided by Laura Poitras.

And as for the problem of Merkel vs the other 80.5 million of us: it was after the aforementioned ~500 billion connections a month and after we were told that "our" IXP (DE-CIX) was bugged by GCHQ, NSA and our very own BND. Merkel didn't mind, the responsible Minister didn't mind -- why would they, it wasn't news to them. But when it was made public that Merkel's private phone was being tapped as well, they had to show some indignation, because the election was closing in and they wouldn't want to look like the total lackeys they are.

That's the difference in reaction he was referring to. Our government doesn't mind us being the target of dragnet surveillance. In fact, they'd like to join the club and get access to all that information themselves. That's what the no-spy-agreement is all about.

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Install HTTPS everywhere (was hesitant at first but it works really fine now). It makes NSA SIGINT hate you cause they got most likely harmless, useless info in encrypted form stored in their vault.. We can never fill up their space individually. Encryption is the only tool to at least cause resistance at individual level. So far, in the next 5 years the issue needs to be addressed globally (creating even better encryption methods is one answer, endless cat&mouse game played in mathematics) or nations will start to separate and control their own net...which is a huge step backwards, wiping 20 years of internet freedom in it's wake and doesn't address the issue in personal level.. Most likely such intranets are very very heavily controlled and monitored.. goodbye freedom.

Encryption is the first step and one that offers some personal privacy, next is to contact to every page you visit daily to request https if it isn't available (or works poorly).

Basically, using end-to-end encryption everywhere you can is the only thing the majority of us can do who don't live in US. Even then the major hubs (google, facebook etc) are not safe but at least lets make them go physically to each and every server farm to install signal splitters and backdoors. And Google and Facebook store your data anyway by default, that's how they work. But FB won't come knocking on your door in the middle of the night.

Those can vote in US, we are looking at you, why do we need to even think about this? Use your vote wisely. Rebel if needed. If this does not change, rest of the world WILL take measures to stop traffic going in thru US unnecessarily.