Let's forget about the "politics" of NSA for a minute

First, about Clapper's comment, which (paraphrased) is this:  "The idea that we're trolling through everyone's stuff is absurd - there's too much of it.  We couldn't do it if we wanted to."

This is a falsehood wrapped in an oxymoron, disguising an outrage.

The oxymoron:  "We're gathering millions of bits of information, and that means there's too much information to look at."

The falsehood:  Anyone who has actually been involved in creating data mining software, as I have, will know that computers are now capable not only of sifting through millions of pieces of data for words, but can now go far beyond that and analyze the "stuff" for semantic content, meaning thoughts and ideas.  There's simply no such thing as "too much of it" when an agency has $billions to spend and can run the "stuff" through a hundred supercomputers, executing billions of instructions per second, as the NSA can - and undoubtedly DOES - do.  Mr. Clapper knows that what he is saying simply isn't true.

The outrage:  That Americans should be expected to believe - and be comforted  - that they're safe from governmental intrusion by the reassurance that "there's too much stuff" for an agency to look at anyway.  Is THIS where an American's safety from governmental intrusion should lie?  Really??!!  You're safe from surveillance merely because the government lacks the capability to spy on everyone (which, as I've said, is a falsehood)?  You're safe from the police breaking into your house because we don't have enough cops to do that "even if we wanted to".  If you don't find that chilling, I urge you to think about it more deeply.

Second, the debate about "traitor" versus "hero":  It seems to me that this situation is very different from the one that an ordinary "whistleblower" deals with, although our whistleblower protections themselves seem to have blown up in the past few years.  What options are there for a citizen who finds himself watching the government accumulate vast powers unto itself - powers of which citizens are uninformed, misinformed or deliberately misled - and a government that not only will use, but has used, those vast powers to see to it that the citizens never do know about its activities.   What are the reasonable options available for anyone to sound the alarm about government running amok, if his only choices are silence or "treason"?  Do we have any mechanism in place whereby such disclosures can be made to anyone except the very government and the very agencies that would be the subject of such disclosures?