Traitors, plain and simple.
Before, terrorists could only guess at the fact the were being spied on, and one could suppose, became a bit complacent about it.
With everything out in the open, it would be very easy to say, "we're going to blow up the Empire State Building next Tuesday", then go blow up the Eiffel Tower instead.
Misdirection is too easy to apply when you know you're being overheard.
And Julian Assange you ask? I think he just started Wikileaks to try and get laid. Trouble, that didn't work out so well, and now there's a warrant out for his arrest.
As for the rest of this discussion, the idealist at this site are just way too naive and tedious for their own good.
It all comes down to this, "why should the US be forced to wage war on a higher standard than the rest of the human dreck on this planet? (*) Look up Kymer Rouge, Pol Pot, The Bataan Death March, and before I forget, "The Final Solution", and "The Holocaust", I'm pretty sure those weren't the US's doing, and I'm damned sure they were civil rights violations.
I'm also absolutely positive, that none of you doing all this whining have ever been subjected to "oppression by the totalitarian US government". Because if you were, you wouldn't be on the internet running your paranoid, self serving yaps so incessantly.
Josef Stalin killed millions of his own people, and all you have to cry so loudly about is somebody may be listening to your phone calls.
(*) Not to mention the fact that all of you "experts" at how war should be waged, have probably never served, or ever had any intention of doing so.