As a network security professional I can't stop laughing and crying at the same time.
Laughing because what he talks about is extremely oversimplified and exaggerated and crying because there are enough people who actually are paranoid enough to believe in this.

There is a big gap between what is theoretically possible and what is practically possible. After that there is another big gap between what is actually possible and what is actually done.

While such presentations shed a bit of light on the operations behind the scenes it is doing more harm than to actually educate people. It scares enough people to an extend that is influencing them more than the real surveillance threat.

From now on I am going to wear a paper bag over my head just in case.

Understanding hacking is a big part of network security.

I never said I know more. I'm pretty much just a freshman since I'm just doing what I do for like 3 years. I just said he oversimplifies it for the audience. And if you oversimplify it then the audience will take things the wrong way and start thinking the government is actually spying on unsuspecting citizens. Which I think he intended. Even the word spying is misused. It only spies on its targets. Normal citizens maybe get their data tapped but no human soul will ever see them as it's just that big amount of data that bots have to sift through it and discarding 99,99% of the data. Nobody at the government cares about you sitting in front of your kinect or laptop.

Yes, a lot of things are possible but most of them are only possible in certain circumstances and often require actual action from the user itself. You can't just go and say: "I'm gonna hack that target". You need to do a lot of research and patience to target a single individuum and actually spy on it. You can't do that to millions of internet users. That's why it's only practical for them to only care about their actual targets aka criminals.

However the media and people like hime make it deliberately seem like bad people and the government are constantly spying on you when you jack off in front of your laptop. That is misleading and spreading unnecessary fear.

You are overestimating yourself.

Ok mister "I've been doing this for three years", let's not tell anybody at all that the tools and MO exist to gather information from unsuspecting citizens JUST IN CASE the average person overreacts and doesn't want to jackoff in front of his PC anymore.

You really are missing the point here. Did you actually watch the video?

I watched the whole video and tried to hold back my vomit the whole time.

People are overestimating the importance of their data. No one gives a shit about you or the data garbage you produce. In fact they actually hate to sift through all the garbage to get the good stuff. Only if you start to get suspicious and hit the right triggers for the filters of the bots that are going through the raw data the data gets collected and not immediately deleted.

It's simply unfeasible for the government or other "criminals" to scan and keep all the data they collect. So while they might catch your data they don't care for it. Much less than you.

I don't know about you but I don't feel particularly spied on when a soulless program looks for keywords in my collected data and after that discards it.

fair points I suppose.

But vomiting? Come on man.

I'm just sick of people spreading fear by distributing false information about how technology works.

The core might be true but the reality often looks different. Pretty much everything is possible with PCs but those are ideal cases with additional aid of the user itself. The chance of an actual human looking at video footage of an innocent citizen that actually shows any important stuff is lower than winning in the lottery.

Nobody really cares about 99.99999% of the data they collect. But it's a lot easier and less risky to first collect all data and look through it than do actual physical detective work to find the criminals. That's why fishermen use echo-location and nets and not just fishing rods.