I honestly think the dude is not just full of crap, but a little unbalanced.
NPR's Mark Memmot reports Carrie Cordero, the director of national securities studies at Georgetown University Law Center, spoke with Steve Henn on NPR's Morning Edition on Wednesday and told Henn "the notion that this individual has the authority to go ahead and ... 'wiretap' people is just ridiculous."
Cordero didn't go into detail on how surveillance programs work, but she said Snowden's assertion "does not resemble anything close to what I observed within the intelligence community."
While that may very well be true in the case of one individual (Snowden) . . . it's a fool's errand to try and dismiss the notion that an entity like the NSA isn't capable of scooping up every phone call/email etc. etc and isn't capable of taping into almost any call any time they want. If someone is dismissive of this, they are showing ignorance of the modern telecommunications network. Fiber optic capacity, massive core switching capabilities, VoIP and the ability to re-route (survive) on the fly has allowed telecommunications companies to consolidate traffic into fewer Core Switching Centers. Making it much easier for an entity like the NSA with it's massive data mining capabilities to tap into those network cores and scoop up just about anything they want, and to if they so desire, listen to just about anything they want and read just about anything they want.