No, no, you're totally forgiven Kleinbloo! We all overreact sometimes, that's part of what makes us human, so I harbor no hard feelings there. Please accept my apology for the snide indictments, I was hesitant about sounding flippant in my introduction, and I'm sorry if my last line left you feeling defensive. I've looked through past hubski posts about surveillance, spying, NSA and such topics, and came across several of your interesting, insightful and valuable comments, so I know you're knowledgeable about the topic, and I certainly didn't intend to grandstand on your reply to my comment. I suppose I was mainly confused by your original sentiments, which felt dismissively defensive towards the NSA. When you say:
I think it's safe to say that anything of any real note has been expunged, purged, destroyed, erased, forgotten, circular-filed, binned and otherwise annihilated.
Are you saying that the evidence in this case isn't of note, or otherwise not worth examining in a courtroom? I understand that today's surveillance apparatus is still largely secret and changing fast which means this case will never deliver some dagger to the heart, but perhaps this is just a chink in their knee armor? Isn't this the best we've got, as far as court cases go? There seems to be some evidence here, but if litigation isn't a good offensive strategy against the surveillance apparatus, then what is?