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Foreigners like me have no privacy rights whatsoever. Yet we keep using U.S.-based services all the time, making us a legal target for gathering and storing our private information. Other countries do surveillance as well. But nobody has the global visibility that United States does.

The United States, like any great power, is always going to have an intelligence operation, and some electronic surveillance is obligatory in the modern world.

U.S. companies need clear guidelines on when they have to turn over electronic communications to law enforcement if that information is stored abroad. The current uncertainty harms U.S. businesses and their customers and does not well-serve our foreign relationships.

U.S. intelligence services routinely use collection methods against foreigners that foreseeably - with certainty - ingest high volumes of U.S. communications as well.

Intelligence services exist to do things that are illegal abroad. They exist to tell lies.

Intelligence collection is not confined to the communications of adversaries or of the guilty. Rather, it's about gaining information otherwise unavailable that would help keep Americans safe and free.

Our government should not be spying on the electronic communications of American citizens. Nor should our iPhones or Android devices be subject to unreasonable searches and seizures.

Taking privacy cues from the federal government is - to say the least - ironic, considering today's Orwellian level of surveillance. At virtually any given time outside of one's own home, an American citizen can reasonably assume his movements and actions are being monitored by something, by somebody, somewhere.

Laws and regulations are supposed to restrict the kind of surveillance governments do. In fact, the U.S. government is quite restricted in what kind of surveillance they can do on U.S. citizens. The problem is that 96 percent of the planet is not U.S. citizens.

I know that my cell phone in Iran... is bugged, and they listen in, and my emails, I'm sure, are monitored inside Iran. They have my email address; it's not like they can't snoop on it.