Actually Important

I wasn't meaning to minimize the importance of the WaPo story by saying there was nothing especially surprising. Verifying and going into detail on not very surprising things can be an especially important thing to do, particularly on the front page of the Village rag. There are lots of important takeaways, but Greenwald provides a succint version of an important one from the national security perspective:

[W]e keep sacrificing our privacy to the National Security State in exchange for less security.

Whatever the initial thoughts behind any of this stuff, it's a tremendous waste of money and resources which, as I said below, can't possibly, in the net, be useful. It serves to transfer money and power to elites while cementing the existence of a giant and extremely opaque patronage system. One with surveillance capabilities.

Something only civil liberties extremists like Greenwald should worry about.