I've seen too many business leaving all of their data - customers, employees, prospective employees - sitting around unencrypted and unprotected to be too concerned about supposed NSA abilities just yet. Names, SSN, addresses, CC numbers. It's all up for grabs in most companies.

I've seen far more damage from criminal activity on the information side than any government involvement yet. The Sony fiasco just recently is a great example of how even huge companies with the resources to secure their data choose not to.

As for the government, believe me, I am against any sort of 1984, Minority Report future. But the same people that are so quick to denounce the US Government over a couple leaked, debunked slides from a traitor contractor who fled immediately to hostile nations are the same people ready to declare war over terrorist attacks.

It's easy to sit in a server room and complain about government spying (you're not monitoring your network traffic??) and then order hundreds of thousands of our troops into combat after another group of innocent citizens is killed in an attack on US soil.

Let's try and be a little more pragmatic and reasonable. Protecting your data, and your customers data is a great. But the knee-jerk, conspiracy theory reaction to recent "revelations" (did you think the NSA just read the paper and played chess?) is ridiculous.

As data professionals we know how much data the private sector has been amassing over the years. We know how much information can be gleaned from seemingly standard product warranty sign-ups or website forms. And we know how much information people are posting about themselves, 24 hours a day, to every form of social media they can get their hands on. Yet even as we encourage businesses to reap the benefits of mining this data for value, even as we post guides on how to data mine, to store this data and back it up, how to keep personal details and life-times of shopping habits we condemn our government for doing the same thing?

Very odd in my mind. We spend so much time and energy trying to determine who is going to buy what, at which price, and yet when the discussion turns to who is going to destroy our national infrastructure and kill our citizens we decide enough is enough. When I make a public tweet to the world, that's mine and the government shouldn't have access to it!