Slightly off topic: China must be very happy about this revelation. We (US) have been criticizing their "great firewall" for so long, but now it's revealed that we have our own program with similar motivations, only a different execution. Rather than burying and censoring information, this surveils your usage of certain information and calls you a terror threat when you step outside the lines.
It takes an enormous amount of rationalizing to compare a system of overt and pervasive government censorship of the Internet --- a system run by the government that blocks access to things the government doesn't want its citizens to read --- to even the most egregiously editorialized assumptions Glenn Greenwald has come up with.
I'm certainly playing the devil's advocate to some degree and being hyperbolic, but fact is we, or should I speak for my self and say I, have been on high moral ground for quite some time, demonizing the "great firewall," applauding Google's circumventions, etc. Yet now we find out we're far closer than we would like to be, and have been for some time.
This is a slippery claim; anything the NSA does that you don't approve of would enable you to claim we're "far closer than we'd like to be" to China. It's a phrasing designed to end discussion, not encourage it.
I think the Chinese government would have preferred no such story, because in the long term it will reinforce awareness of privacy issues, increase the toolset, and it may give whistleblowing ideas to some Chinese.
