WSJ:

Documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal open a rare window into a new global market for the off-the-shelf surveillance technology that has arisen in the decade since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The techniques described in the trove of 200-plus marketing documents include hacking tools that enable governments to break into people's computers and cellphones, and "massive intercept" gear that can gather all Internet communications in a country.

The documents -- the highlights of which are cataloged and searchable here -- were obtained from attendees of a secretive surveillance conference held near Washington, D.C., last month.

Benjamin Wittes:

We seldom stop and ask the question of whether and when our surveillance programs are really coming at the expense of liberty at all or whether the relationship might be more complicated than that -- indeed, whether some of these programs might even enhance liberty.

We should ask these questions because the balance metaphor is incomplete to the point of inducing a deep cognitive error. Any crude notion of a "balancing" between security and liberty badly misstates the relationship between these two goods -- that in the vast majority of circumstances, liberty and security are better understood as necessary preconditions for one another than in some sort of standoff. The absence of liberty will tend to guarantee an absence of security, and conversely, one cannot talk meaningfully about an individual's having liberty in the absence of certain basic conditions of security. While either in excess can threaten the other, neither can meaningfully exist without the other.

Whit Diffie and Susan Landau:

The end of the rainbow would be the ability to store all traffic, then decide later which messages were worthy of further study.

Philip Hensher:

I wish there was some less feeble response to this constant, exhausting, draining surveillance we live under.