[jimfuller]

I welcome this call to action and continue to believe that the open source approach provides the foundation for transparency ... though the red herring in this debate is the concept/notion of privacy.

The reasons why such systems are built and supported is that they check a lot of boxes for purely commercial reasons ... the scenarios that no one is talking about is the one where senators dip into the classified stream giving serious competitive advantage to actors in the free market.

Earlier efforts, such as ECHELON were just state sanctioned industrial espionage and what is going on now is just an extension of the same.

I am all for defending/upgrading the concepts of privacy and basic human rights, but as with many things ... the pragmatic solution is to make it very easy to 'follow the money' ...