[kevin_nisbet]

Just to jump in on the part about metadata vs the message itself. I saw a very interesting talk a couple years ago by an EFF lawyer, who explained this well.

The way I remember it being explained, is in the US metadata had particularly poor legal protections compared to the message content. This is what gave the government any sort of legal basis to claim mass surveillance was legal, compared to say recording and indexing every message from every american. The context of the talk was about cloud and data sovereignty, and making the case that it isn't unsafe to store data in the US with the revelations at the time.

I don't think the talk was recorded, I wish it was, because I think that was the best description I've seen from a legal perspective on why the surveillance programs were targeting metadata and not contents.