In this interview, Thomas Drake offers this test, and his background should be of special interest.

Thomas Drake is a former National Security Agency senior executive. He blew the whistle on multibillion-dollar fraud and a vast Fourth Amendment-violating secret electronic surveillance and data mining program that he says fundamentally weakened national security and eroded civil liberties. He was charged under the Espionage Act by the Obama administration and faced 35 years in prison. The criminal case against him ultimately collapsed and charges were dropped.

Here’s Drake’s test.

If I say take your entire life, all your passwords and all your accounts and all your credit cards and every email address, and put it into a box, drive to the other side of town, knock on the door of a perfect stranger, but a fellow citizen, and say, here, I’m giving you this box for safekeeping, would you do it? Everybody to date has said, of course not. And then I ask, why not? Well, because I don’t trust them. So then I say, well, if you don’t trust your fellow citizen, then why would you trust the government in secret, without your consent–without your consent, I want to reemphasize–with learning everything there is to know about you? Well, and then they kind of look at you funny and say, oh, I never thought about it quite that way.

That’s what we’re facing. And as we saw during the Nixon administration, the ability of the government to abuse and misuse that kind of information is just–without controls, without checks, without the ability to provide legitimate and fundamental oversight, well, then we have a scenario where the government’s out of control in its ability to know everything there is to know about all of its people.