"Greenwald to publish list of U.S. citizens NSA spied on."
Well, this is somewhat counterintuitive and contradictory, given his earlier intent to highlight the metadata side of things (in effect often more revealing than more traditional kinds of directed attention), the ubiquitous ease of access and/or the ultimate need to protect the individual lives and freedoms of people involved ("lives" as in every sense of the word, each of which isn't necessarily applicable to every individual). Lists of names, while pertinent to the issue, were supposed to be beside the larger point. Illustrating something through individual identities is not a neutral tradeoff.
During the course of the revelations it has become clear that the NSA perspective on privacy and accountability is a sort of a parallel universe to how those not on the observers' point in this virtual panopticon see things. While Snowden eventually found it impossible to allay the two viewpoints in his conscious person it bears remembering that he has effectively lived an intelligence community life for at least a decade and thus even now his actions must reflect a world of rationales that more casual web users could not possibly relate to even with the information he has disseminated. Furthermore, by his actions he has made it very difficult for himself to embody a layperson('s cognition), certainly not in the foreseeable future.
As a communication problem this is non-trivial and somewhat ironic as well: how does one understand something that is antitethical or external to oneself? What kind of understanding can that be? In a sense these problematics remind me of of the "expulsion from paradise" and the very deep questions about the nature of knowledge therein.
On a less existential level perhaps, this is also a reminder of a glaring double standard in the functioning on the NSA and the like: especially if one sets oneself up as "exceptional" (in its universal, aspirational "city set on a hill" guise i.e. in the belief that anyone can be equally "exceptional") then treating perceived out-groups (here: non U.S. citizens) as elementally less deserving or less capable of something belies either dishonesty or a deeply flawed methodology.
