[CleanedStar]

"betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed."

Actually, if you look at the Constitution, it says - "The Congress shall have power...To declare War...To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years...To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions...To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia"

If the US was going to have a permanent standing army, an intelligence service monitoring its citizens and so forth, why specifically limit appropriations to two years? Why place power in Congress's hands? Why have citizen's militias repelling foreign invasions?

The US has a professional army more akin to Czarist Russia than anything the founder's imagined.

I never really thought that much about Ai Weiwei, but what he just said is right. There's really no fundamental difference between the kinds of monitoring the government of China does and what the US is doing with things like PRISM.