Classmates and friends of a terrorist could be terrorists, the NSA tells us, so they harvest gigaterapeta exabytes of metadata. Now, in a functioning democracy, this data may be of great interest to counterintelligence but it is essentially valueless for threatening Joe Citizen: trade union activism or cheating on one's wife are not crimes.
But then there are the faithful third world allies of the United States. These sympatico countries like Egypt that go through political convulsions every friday morning. Here the metadata can become an essential tool for unravelling the political dissent that would replace dictatorship by democracy.
I am willing to bet that every high-level trade negotiation between the US and a third-world country will now have as an essential component a "list of names". It is not that the US wishes to provide them, it will be that they cannot refuse - after all there must be a quid-pro-quo for cooperation on ... counter-terrorism.
Snowden has done the citizens of third world countries a disfavor. He has made it known to every tinpot dictator that the complete list of his most effective opponents can be purchased. It remains to be seen whether Snowden himself will be traded back to the US in exchange for an up to date list of Russian dissidents. Now, that would be poetic justice indeed.
Edmund
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