It seems whenever the government doesn’t want anyone to know something, it is all of a sudden critical to national security.

Nobody in the government is talking. It’s a case of national security.”
“Of course. The national security of spying on U.S. citizens.

In the intelligence community, a rumor was almost as good as a confirmation.

He didn’t have regular email like everyone else. He couldn’t afford that digital fingerprint that the NSA, the CIA, the FBI and all the other espionage alphabeticals counted on for their privacy-bashing surveillance of the entire formerly free world.

The same thing at the CIA and the FBI,

I think this mass surveillance by the NSA was never about terrorism: It's all about economic spying & social control. It's all about POWER.