Humanity needs a lesson that would be remembered in their bones.
It did it; for two generations. The GI's and the Silents were the most civic minded generations we ever had. But those were our grandparents (or great grandparents) now, and living memory has finally faded. Here's hoping it doesn't take another Passchendaele or Hiroshima to reignite it.
And the mass buy-in resulted in the building of systems, creating of institutions and setting of precedents that were and are being used less than civic purposes. So unfortunately I'm not sure that's sustainable either.
Ever since the counter-culture movement of the 1960s, it's been cool to "stick it to the man", which unfortunately translates to anti-institutionalism too often. Tearing things down never yields a positive result when no good institutions exist or are created to fill the vacuum.
At that scale, it takes a lot of power, courage, and integrity for a leader to reform the institution. Power itself can be a corrupting influence when too much is vested onto a single person -- hence the necessity of integrity.
On the specific issue of internal surveillance and its abuses, that is laughable, given the way that accelerated after WWII, with no substantial attempt at checking it until some fairly limited reforms were adopted in the 1970s after the Nixon-era abuses, with those restrictions being fairly flagrantly ignored (and formally weakened) after 9/11.
You are literally talking about the founders of the surveillance state.