Shit, I really feel sorry for the NSA workers who have to read all this stuff. I know it's a massive privacy scandal but seriously, the idea of reading people's email just sounds like some form of Kafka-esque torture.
Masses of data, I'd imagine yes, but getting into people's lives through their email is....quite the rabbit hole. I had a mate at uni who was a "securities expert" in his spare time and at times he'd show me these lists or email addresses and passwords, thousands of them. I got sucked in and I remember one email address distinctly. It was a woman from Oklahoma and it was basically her whole life (family names, dates, schedule, events, job moves, doctors apps, even a security code to her friends house) it was unreal. It was at that point where my curiously was piqued and at the same time I tasted a distinct flavour that I was violating something i shouldn't.
I stopped.
The kicker to all of this. The passwords. That particular woman's was password12345
Masses of data, I'd imagine yes, but getting into people's lives through their email is....quite the rabbit hole. I had a mate at uni who was a "securities expert" in his spare time and at times he'd show me these lists or email addresses and passwords, thousands of them. I got sucked in and I remember one email address distinctly. It was a woman from Oklahoma and it was basically her whole life (family names, dates, schedule, events, job moves, doctors apps, even a security code to her friends house) it was unreal. It was at that point where my curiously was piqued and at the same time I tasted a distinct flavour that I was violating something i shouldn't.
I stopped.
The kicker to all of this. The passwords. That particular woman's was password12345