Edward Snowden's not the first to make claims about NSA

WASHINGTON — Mathematician William Binney worked for the National Security Agency for four decades, and in the late 1990s he helped design a system to sort through the digital data the agency was sucking up in the exploding universe of bits and bytes.
When the agency picked a rival technology, he became disillusioned. He retired a month after the terrorist attacks of Sept 11, 2001, and later went public with his concerns.
Binney and several other former NSA employees said that the cyber-spying agency had created a massive digital dragnet to secretly track communications of Americans. Government officials denied the allegations and dismissed Binney and the others as conspiracy theorists who lost a bureaucratic fight.
Revelations from Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked secrets to the media, have made it clear that the NSA has been collecting and storing millions of domestic phone records every day — numbers, time and location, but not content — for at least seven years.
Another program, known as PRISM, has given the NSA access since at least 2007 to emails, video chats and other communications through U.S. Internet companies to spy on foreigners. American emails inevitably were swept up as well.
Were Binney and his colleagues right? Is the NSA conducing secret surveillance of Americans?

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/la-na-nsa-past-leakers-20130616,0,1378647.story

Yes, I am sure it is nothing new.  The US has been spying on it's own citizens for ages.  Even Bush did it, it must be Bush's fault!