As usual, Stallman was not only ahead of his time, but also swimming against the tide of conventional wisdom, immediately after the attacks of 9/11. While nearly everyone else was focused on more mundane concerns of immediate importance, he was worried and tried to warn us about long-term, higher-order, societal consequences. (He's always doing that -- worrying about long-term, higher-order consequences -- so his warnings and antics strike more practical people as being 'out of touch with reality.')

Like him or not, Richard Stallman is already a major historical figure, because his impact on society (via the gnu, FSF, various manifestos, and activism) will be felt for a very long time. Much of what he has said/written in the past has gained stature with the passing of time.

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Edit: added last sentence.

    Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the 
    broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that 
    appears to have required them to hand over millions of 
    users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn 
    that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google 
    is disclosing information about our users’ Internet 
    activity on such a scale is completely false.

I'm not sure how much more strongly you'd like that worded. It seems pretty complete to me.

As someone who has tried to come up with a lot of product names...

"Shortcat -- killing mice, one at a time."

is just genius. Super-kudos to whoever came up with that.

Please don't make this about one party or one president. It's not. This kind of behavior goes way, way beyond partisan politics, and to reduce it to that is to abdicate pretty much all of your agency or ability to do anything about it, not least because partisan politics is more about apportioning blame for problems than it is finding solutions to them.

Getting all, "Thanks, Obama!" over what the NSA was up to long before he was elected — if not before Bush was elected — is giving the people who actually did this, and are still doing it, a complete pass.

I can personally confirm Palantir Prism is not NSA's Prism. I helped build that team and write that software in 2006. It was Palantir Finance, and it was built for use at hedge funds and financial houses as a quant analysis platform for traders.

This is why I get very angry whenever somebody calls Stallman a nut. He's not a nut. He's a visionary; albeit a very pessimistic and dystopian one. Call him crazy now, but in 2023 you'll look back at what he said now, and you'll see how it's all right and wish you'd done something. Anything.

But no. Free software is not business-oriented. He's a nut because of his privacy advocation; he must have something to hide. Let's just ignore him, and start startups and get everyone to accept our vendor lock-in and remain blissfully unaware how we're harming everyone.

Today I am throwing out the newspaper I was saving from the day after Obama was elected and all the electronic newspaper front pages from around the world I was saving from that day are being deleted from my hard drive. I've lost all pride.

I am utterly disgusted with this administration. Any good he has done is wiped out by being far worse than Bush with the domestic spying and whistleblower prosecutions.

How are we any better than China - because we at least eventually find out? Because people don't get disappeared off the street?

You remember that feeling of incredible relief when we saw Bush finally being flown away in the helicopter on his last day? Well that feeling is going to be deja vu in a couple years.

I just hope the next president doesn't try to do a one-up like Obama did to Bush. Obama's library/museum is going to be even more hypocritical than Bush's.