[mhurron]

Except they are at odds. People are making information publicly available and are then turning around complaining that people are looking at their publicly available information.

People get to choose to share or not to share, but when they scream it out in public they do not get to choose who hears it.

[declan]

This is incorrect. I haven't seen any complaint about FBI agents perusing public web sites, or deputy US Marshals poking around public portions of Facebook to try to track down a fugitive.

The flap over the last few weeks has been about government surveillance of information that was not intended to be public. Private email, private IMs, private Facebook messages, etc. Where Americans do have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

[nkassis]

I don't think the majority of the complaints with NSA surveillance is about publicly available information. The issue is with information that they assume is private such as emails, im conversation, call records etc...