Not just the American public. This is blanket spying on the people of the world. Now that might sound less problematic for Americans who want to see those pesky terrorists brought to justice, but it also allows the NSA to build up profiles on everyone.
US border security is already a nightmare, god knows what they can do with this kind of information. Ever searched for torrents on Google? Your next trip to the States might be interesting.
It seems also they could be sharing this data with other national security agencies, which is where this gets really scary:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-22813893
Global Big Brother.
Personally as a user of Gmail, Skydrive, GDrive, Dropbox, Facebook,... I find this incredibly disturbing. I will be doing whatever I can to remove my dependency on any service hosted in the US.
You think Belgium or France or Poland spies on US citizens phone-calls and Google/FB? Inside the US?
As for "Nobody gives a shit if your torrented a movie", first, we're not talking about Joe Average, that downloads GoT in rural Idaho. We're talking about people that matter to society: writers, investigative journalists, dissidents, hackers, activists, etc. They cared very much what A. Swartz did, for example.
Second, even normal people, downloading a "torrented movie" have been hit with huge fines by RIAA.
Which is exactly what governments are.
Extreme resources, very smart people, and very idiot people, incompetent bureaucrats, messy cover-ups, all co-exist, all the time.
What did you thought they were? Incredibly competent XOR incredibly incompetent? (Only the first would be a conspiracy theory, whereas only the second would be gross underestimation).
>If the NSA was able to keep this project under wraps for so long with the number of people involved, I think they would be smart enough to at least slightly alter the words of their puppets, after all this is supposed to be the area of their expertise.
You've never seen badly (or too fast) done spin work?
Not to mention, why would the NSA care to spend too much effort to how those things were phrased?
If you think it matters, I'm afraid, you give the American public too much credit. It's not like it's gonna get suspicious by such small and peripheral signs. Listening to and accepting bad arguments, BS excuses, fake promises, and shit from politicians if what people are doing all their life.
And it's not even like they're gonna do anything about the core situation with regards to privacy. It's just the "hot topic" of the day, to be forgotten for some BS next week. You surely don't expect some kind of revolt of anything? If that was to be, it would have been at the other 20 similar media expositions or against the horrible laws that have been passed openly.