It's a big leap from stealing classified PowerPoint slides to wire tapping phones and accessing dossiers for spies and other agency personal. And the NSA presumably segmented access to very sensitive data says Williamson.

"I have access to lots and lots of confidential documents here at my company, but I'm not allowed to change how the network runs," Williamson says. "He (Snowden) may have had access to PowerPoint slides, but not necessarily have control of all those other systems.

"What we don't know is how broad that leak really was. From a national security point of view, that's where I would want to go back and take a hard look at the veracity of his statements."

Dr. Mike Lloyd, chief technology officer of Red Seal Networks, notes that unverified claims are just that – unverified.

"Hackers have always had a strong tendency to brag, and since so much of the activity is hard to trace, they also tend to exaggerate," Lloyd says.

IF my government is collecting my words, my electronic activity and my email...WITHOUT A WARRANT mind you... and with no conceivable reason to do so.... WHY are people so hell bent on judging the guy who TOLD YOU ... with sufficient proof that our gov't was forced to not lie.

Just wondering why THAT is not the outrage?

Hearing about FISA in a vacuum without any other information would probably cause most people to believe that FISA has the strong potential to violate the fourth amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. In fact, FISA was created to strengthen the fourth amendment and I will explain how.

FISA was created by Ted Kennedy for two reasons. First, it was created as a response to President Nixon using warrantless wiretaps and other searches to target political opponents and activist groups. The other reason it was created was made clear by one of the US Court of appeals decisions that affirmed the constitutionality of FISA, and that is the 1984 US v Duggan decision. Part of the Duggan decision reads:

Prior to the enactment of FISA, virtually every court that had addressed the issue had concluded that the President had the inherent power to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance to collect foreign intelligence information, and that such surveillance constituted an exception to the warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment.

The Duggan decision goes on to list six or seven other appeals court decisions where courts concluded that the President has the inherent power to conduct this kind of warrantless electronic surveillance to collect foreign intelligence information.

Senator Kennedy and President Carter did not like the idea of warrantless wiretapping even though it was judged in the case of foreign espionage and terrorism to be Constitutional …so they created FISA which requires the Justice Department and intelligence agencies of the executive branch to get a judge to sign off on a warrant in order to conduct these surveillances. It also gives a number of congressional committees the ability to look over these warrants.

Critics point out that the judges almost always sign off on FISA warrants. That’s right. They sign off because as pointed out in the Duggan decision, appeals courts have already ruled many times that the President has the right to conduct this surveillance and that this surveillance does not violate the fourth amendment provided that the ultimate target of the investigation is a foreign sponsored entity or terrorist organization. FISA does provide additional rules as to how these activities are to be done and also restricts how long the justice department and intelligence agencies can hold onto the acquired information before they must dispose of it.

Installation and use of a pen register by the telephone company, at the behest of the government, to record the telephone numbers dialed from a private residence is not a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979) (concluding that the defendant did not likely have an expectation of privacy in the numbers he dialed, but even if he did, such expectation was unreasonable).

But since the 1979 ruling in Smith v. Maryland it has been well settled that the government does not need a warrant to look at phone records — information about, say, the duration and direction of calls that companies routinely gather from their customers, who therefore have no reasonable expectation of privacy.

To the extent that the NSA is gathering only “metadata” about people’s phone calls and their activities on social media, Smith v. Maryland is on the government’s side.

True, the FISA court works in secret — not ideal for a purist civil libertarian. But remember that the court was established as a remedy for the unchecked executive-branch snooping of the 1960s and 1970s, and that it was further empowered under the 2008 amendments to remedy perceived excesses of the George W. Bush administration.

Metadata and private content travel together on the Internet, so it’s technically easy to look at the latter after accumulating the former. But the 2008 statute requires the government to take steps — known as “minimization” — to limit warrantless access to private data.

Maybe those procedures are routinely violated. Yet for all his claimed knowledge of wrongdoing, leaker Edward Snowden has yet to specify a single such instance.