[mbateman]

Everything that's wrong with the current intelligence approach in a sentence: "And he trusts himself to use these powers more than he did the Bush administration."

This completely vindicates Snowden's point about the current system being one of policy instead of law, and of enabling turnkey tyranny.

[abvdasker]

I think it's a symptom of corruption of the system's built-in checks and balances. The executive branch is much more powerful now than it used to be, and is the only branch that is composed entirely of a single party. The only politically homogenous branch is now far-and-away the most powerful.