Last week news broke, via a conscientious objector, that the US government is culling metadata bout phone calls in the use en masse. On the heels of this another story broke that the government had back-doors into the servers of several big-name tech entities: Google, Facebook, et al. This was later revealed to be less of a back door and more of a web tool for gathering court-mandated data from said entities.

A week later I have to ask: Why the outrage?

As I see it there are two issues:

1. Metadata harvesting via Verizon
2. PRISM as a tool for accessing big providers’ data sources

Let me address them in reverse.