Cost of freedom?

Most of the main papers both sides of the pond blindly ran The Sunday Times story  and then laughably backtracked after it was clearly an unfounded claim. Not once has any credible evidence been released to show that anything Edward Snowden  did, has in anyway compromised any serving military personnel. What it did do is highlight how deep and far reaching each governments surveillance policies secretly invade our on-line lives. most of the public is either apathetic or ignorant to this information. So the public don't care and the leaks haven't hurt anyone, everyone's happy right? But in these times of deep austerity how much does this surveillance cost us? In the U.K. it costs us 2 billion for our security and intelligence agencies and GCHQ take the lions share of that. But that is dwarfed in comparison to the U.S.A. mass surveillance via the N.S.A. which comes in at a staggering $52 billion. So the question is if this very expensive and very intrusive mass surveillance isn't fit for purpose, what is its real purpose? ( apart from looking at your naked Facebook pics of course), anyone read a good book lately, 1984 maybe.

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