Gyroscopic Investing

Dualstow: I used duckduckgo for 5 minutes and then I learned about the heartbleed breach this week. NSA is out denying that they are exploiting it. I'm back to google anyway.

CraigR: The heartbleed vulnerability primarily affects the server's private key as the biggest threat, so vendors are patching and generating new keys to be sure. So using a service like duckduckgo.com, startpage, etc. is not going to be an issue. The problem is likely already patched.

The reality is these agencies are collecting so much information I doubt they can effectively use most of it until well after the fact. They are drinking from the proverbial fire hose. Targeted individuals though are a different matter once you are on the radar screen. At that point they will know just about anything about you and your social connections, etc.

Even with the supposed expansion of "big data" storage and reduction mechanisms you still need a human to make sense of the pieces. That's always going to be a bottleneck.