It's not domestic spying if the servers are located out of the country, right?

Despite the fact that the NSA has far-reaching legal authority to monitor Internet traffic and has never lost a court case where it wanted data that someone else didn't want it to have, the Snowden leak keeps unveiling program after program designed to circumvent the law and give the NSA even greater access to information that many of us would have consider private.

On display today is the NSA program codenamed Muscular, by which is hacked into the front end servers of Google, Yahoo, and other data giants to get easier access to the unencrypted data passing point to point within the companies' data network. Once they created the hack, they captured vast amounts of data, defending their practice by altering the definition of surveillance. But the claim that it's only surveillance if you look at the data after you steal it is weak at best, and when taken in context with other documents whereby human analysts complain about the relative ineffectiveness of the program (you can't have a complaint about a program without someone looking at the data!), it seems fairly evident that the NSA is once again overreaching.

The consequences of NSA policy is starting to impact how the world (both our allies and enemies) view the US, and it's starting to have real-world economic impacts. By way of example, (soured from Extremetech.com) Multiple US providers of encrypted email services have shut down rather than be forced to reveal their users. In the case of Lavabit, the government has argued that forcing the company to reveal the private email encryption keys for some 400,000 customers was not an undue burden in its quest to seize Edward Snowden’s email account. The fact that 399,999 of the people in question had done nothing wrong and were not under any sort of surveillance order was besides the point.

Thanks to Techdirt for pointing me to an article in Der Spiegel, detailing more of the NSA's programs for hacking into and using data from smartphones (but definitely not our smartphones. Nope. Only the smartphones of the really really bad guys!)

Among some of the more revealing bits from the article are the comments by former NSA head Michael Hayden, where he refers to each of the [at that time] 400,000 iphone apps as "400,000 possibilities for attacks" and the presentation's display of photos purportedly taken from hacked smartphones, including one of "a former senior government official of a foreign country who, according to the NSA, is relaxing on his couch in front of a TV set and taking pictures of himself -- with his iPhone. To protect the person's privacy, SPIEGEL has chosen not to reveal his name or any other details."

While I suppose on some level its comforting to know that our government has the capability to use this technology to track and monitor America's "enemies", I just can't bring myself to believe that our government officials will use this technology responsibly, or just to spy on actual and current enemies of our nation. In fact, I have a hard time believing that the NSA agents will consistently use this technology to spy on enemy opera