| endimion said: it's not like the US [...] has millions upon millions of political prisoners or even suspected terrorists... |
Well, the official US "terrorist watch list" has about 875.000 people, so they're not far from "millions". They may have already reached the million, for 875.000 was just the latest published number. And back in 2011, it was still about 400.000, so that list is growing very fast.
But what many people seem to forget is that it's not just the actual suspects who are being surveilled, since they are allowed to surveil "two or three" layers of contacts of the suspect (according to NSA-director Jon C. Inglis). For example, imagine Facebook user X is being considered a suspect, for whatever reason. Then they are not just allowed to surveil user X, but also all friends/contacts of user X (layer 1), all contacts of contacts of user X (layer 2), and apparently at least in some cases even all contacts of contacts of contacts of user X (layer 3).
