Smart Guy Talks PRISM, Is Sceptical

Connelley used to do climate scientist.  He knows computers up the wazoo, and is in general a badass and not easily taken in.  He thinks there is less to PRISM than the hype surrounding it would suggest.  He's worth a read.  Probably his most immediately compelling argument is that the funding behind the project is not nearly what you would require to spy on the entire planet:

Another thing that suggests strongly to me that this is only an analysis-of-received-data type operation is the price tag: $20M/y. That doesn’t sound like the kind of money to fund searching through all of even just Google’s vast hoards of data, let alone all the rest.

Meanwhile this guy is angling for both hero-dom and martyrdom.   We'll see over the course of the next couple of days whether he's earned either.