Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations.

[Jackalope]

Here's a piece from Forbes, I'd suggest reading the whole thing.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher...-too-much/

Emphasis added to excerpt below.

The government’s widespread collection of evidence led Justice Antonin Scalia to deliver a stinging dissent from the bench on Monday, raging against the majority’s approval of taking DNA samples from the cheeks of arrestees in Maryland v. King. Scalia described the resulting DNA database as a “genetic panopticon” that violates the Fourth Amendment prohibition of unreasonable searches.

It’s interesting Scalia used the word “panopticon,” since it’s also the term of choice for privacy experts who study the government’s collection of digital data. They fear that the warehousing of data about citizens, from who they call to the books they order on Amazon, could have the same chilling effect as the prison guards located in a central tower — the panopticon — that Jeremy Bentham described back in 1816.

[...]

The court also may eventually take up arguments based on the panopticon effect: That pervasive surveillance stifles the First Amendment rights of citizens. So far that argument hasn’t been successful, but Richards and others argue that when the government effectively can track how millions of people think, those people might think twice about engaging in social protest or even buying reading materials that would identify them as subversive.