[throw10920]

Nobody's "forgetting" anything - it's simply that the US doesn't have any programs that are remotely comparable to those of Russia or China. For instance, show me the US federal law that requires that companies to provide them with constant unencrypted access to all users' data (and forbid E2E), without a warrant, and to provide real-time monitoring and censorship of all communication data.

Comparing metadata collection to legally mandated decryption, storage, monitoring, and censorship of all user data and metadata is insane.

[somenameforme]

You're confusing section 215 of the "Patriot Act" - later on the "USA FREEDOM Act" (don't you love the names) with PRISM. The two are quite different spying acts. The USA FREEDOM spying is where the whole metadata only debacle came from.

From the Wiki which references the NSA's own slides, PRISM offers: "extensive, in-depth surveillance on LIVE [emphasis mine] communications and stored information" with examples including email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP chats (such as Skype), file transfers, and social networking details.

One of the leaked documents is a training manual for spying on Skype calls, which are routed right on over to the NSA. It even had a technical support FAQ which includes issues like understanding why messages are being repeated - they're being synched to another device which resends everything, or how to most effectively spy on a user using multiple IDs. It was quite user friendly!

The entire scope of the NSA is really quite absurd. They even had/have spies installed in World of Warcraft [1]. It's all quite dystopic but it often feels like we're stuck closer to Brazil than 1984.

[1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/12/ns...