This story reminds me of Watch_Dogs. When you are just walking around you see their faces, automatically get facial recognition, and know something big about their lives. Sometimes it's something like "brother runs a grow op", "frequent purchase: porn", or "lives with 5 cats". For those who haven't played, this is the only video on YouTube that shows the facial recognition but the rest of the game just walking down the street you see these things pop up all the time. The other videos seem to have disabled this feature for the most part for their "cool walk through chicago" videos. This also plays in the whole digital panopticon concept that Glenn Greenwald talks about, and why I'm not entirely convinced Snowden wasn't acting under direct orders of the NSA to leak those documents. I think the leaks basically just scared everyone into conforming and not into actually fighting back. https://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matters And if you think about it, if Snowden is operating under NSA still, he now is basically in the position of being the ultimate spy on whistleblowers. Everyone is going to him/Glenn for advice, Snowden talks to Glenn, Poitras, Assange, Manning, etc. He has a bitcoin donation link set up where they can trace donors from...and expands their power in our collective conscious.