It's all fun and games until you have to run...
His disappearance is probably due to the HK's warning of extradition. Why he chose HK over a number of other areas is beyond me. Actually, why he did this at all is beyond me, if only because the big reveal (the government is spying on electronic communications!) is yesterday's news. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to parse together the immunity clause for telecom companies along with the authorization for warrantless (but judicially-approved) gathering of call and email logs contained within the Patriot Act and come up with the basic outline of the PRISM program.
Examination of the contents of specific emails and calls, if you are a US Citizen, typically requires a warrant (though that's not much of a barrier with the "special" court"). The sheer amount of data means that actually logging the contents of every communique would result in a huge noise-to-signal ratio, so instead they log and triangulate the sender, destination, duration, frequency, etc and look for patterns. Obviously we don't know the utility of such actions, but the likes of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and others have been telling the market that such activities are huge moneymakers.
While I abhor the activities, until the Patriot Act is revised or trashed such things are legal. The actual legitimacy under the Constitution is both hard to determine (mainly, is this really unconstitutional search and seizure) and easy to dismiss (national security concern, no real mechanism within the Judicial branch to review such behavior or evaluate the national security claim).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
