who is really in charge of American policy--elected officials or unaccountable securocrats with deep ties to private security corporations?

It's those retroactive investigations that are going to get you.

The "NSA has restored domestic, electronic, surveillance programmes," said to have been dialed-back in the wake of the Watergate scandal. "As early as 1979 we could track a specific person and zoom in on his phone conversation while he was communicating," Newsham averred. "Since our satellites could in 1984 film a postage stamp lying on the ground, it is almost impossible to imagine how all-encompassing the system must be today."

Targeting of US political figures would not occur by accident, but was designed into the system from the start." "TEMPORA," the whistleblower averred, "is the signals intelligence community's first 'full-take' Internet buffer that doesn't care about content type and pays only marginal attention to the Human Rights Act. It snarfs everything, in a rolling buffer to allow retroactive investigation without missing a single bit."

"Right now," Snowden said, "the buffer can hold three days of traffic, but that's being improved. Three days may not sound like much, but remember that that's not metadata. 'Full-take' means it doesn't miss anything, and ingests the entirety of each circuit's capacity.