Yawn.
Before all the sheeple join Duncan in hysterical shrieking, maybe they should stop for a moment and consider the actual physical evidence.
Firstly, let's look at the claim that vendors are deliberately sending or letting the NSA send out tampered kit 'everywhere'. Duncan, Greenwald and the rest of the shepherds like to claim this is widespread and a threat to us all. Really? If so then we must all be getting duff kit, right? Or at least a large proportion, maybe? So where are any examples of the supposedly 'mass-deployed' kit? Can Greenie (or Duncan) provide a single example of a CISCO router with such an 'extra' loaded? No. But they want to insist it is a widespread threat to everyone's privacy? I do have no doubt that the spies do use specially hacked kit to gain access to foreign secrets on a very limited basis (network printers with hard-drives in Iran spring to mind), but that would have to be a very limited deployment, otherwise some geek messing around in his spare time would have found an example of it by now. So, it would seem that much-hyped 'threat' is actually just that, hype.
Secondly, there is the concentration on the data being gathered, not what actually happens to the data. It is easy for the shepherds to state 'all the coms down a tapped submarine cable were gathered and stored', it generates the right level of paranoia without actually looking at the reality of what happens to the data. The vast majority never even gets watched/read/heard by human beings, being swept for metadata by computers. It is not stored 'forever' but is regularly flushed to make room for new data. This was admitted in Snowjob's own 'revelations' on TEMPORA. Metadata and keywords are used because the whole sifting job is about targeting for further analysis - no-one, not even China, has enough resources to actually sit and read/watch/hear every single communication on the Internet. If China could then they wouldn't need the Great Firewall, they'd simply let everyone talk on the Web, sift out and then arrest all the dissenters. Instead, they had to build a clumsy and incomplete barrier.
Which brings us to the third point - desire being passed off as reality. Duncan even is forced to admit in his article that a lot of what him and the shepherds like to imply is a threat to everyone's privacy now is nothing more than goals that NSA and co aspire to. It is also an aspiration to end World hunger or send people to the next galaxy, we even have some of the technology to do so, but that does not mean those aspirations are going to become realities today. But such qualification doesn't sell copy, advertising space or books, does it?
Which raises another point - why would the NSA actually want to know all our secrets? Does it really add any value? In a few, very rare cases there might be some gain through blackmailing a specific person, but for everyone? Many of the loudest bleaters like to claim this info could be used to rig elections - how? Please do explain, are the NSA going to try blackmailing all the voters of one party? Or just maybe select politicians? The latter would be very risky, it is just begging for exposure, and definitely not guaranteed, so why would the NSA risk it? And it also comes back to the question of if it is only targeting select politicians, surely that means Joe Average is again of zero interest to the spooks? So, no, everyone's secrets are not being listened to, and if they are inadvertently heard due to a sifting error then they are disregarded as unimportant anyway.
And then we have the snarky description of those that would disagree with the shepherds as 'apologists'. LOL, it's just like the AGW debate - 'if you don't agree with AGW then you must be an apologist in the pay of the oil companies!' Thanks, Dunc, but I think it's more of a case that some of us that were already well-informed can do a little more thinking for themselves.
