Privacy and security

Regarding the benefits, they are dubious at best. The probability of being harmed by a terrorist attack is vanishingly small; you are orders of magnitude more likely to die in a car accident, and more likely to die from being hit by lightening. For that risk, why should the rest of us tolerate being spied on, being groped at airports, and being told the state is free to act outside the bounds of judicial oversight (one of the bedrocks of common law)?

Not to mention, the US government does more to foster terrorism than to fight it. This is easier for non-Americans to understand, because they don't have the concept of exceptionalism baked into their head from childhood. Animosity toward America does not come from the success or freedom of her people (that's why people LOVE America), the animosity comes from imperialism and American troops stationed in parts of the world whose people take it as an extreme affront.

It's hard to produce any evidence regarding the NSA because it's so secretive and companies and individuals that are forced to deal with it are put under gag orders. That's why it's so amazing this information finally got out (thank god for whistleblowers who literally put their lives on the line to bring this awful behaviour into the daylight - I have no doubt that the leaker, if ever revealed, will have his or her life ruined by the justice department). But consider sister agencies like the FBI, which have a long history of abusing surveillance powers (http://www.aclu.org/free-speech/aclu-releases-report-fbi-cru...). It's very easy to find the history of abuses from various government agencies (for instance, the census bureau using its data to round up Japanese-americans into concentration camps in World War 2), so why should the onus be on those of us who oppose domestic spying to prove that the NSA isn't abusing its power?

Also, you say "I am delighted that we can all express our outrage online without fear of disappearing in the night—that’s pretty remarkable. I am happy that citizens can own guns (I have gone a little off the deep end as a prepper…). If all this stops, then it’d be time to worry."

This doesn't happen in one step. No society goes from freedom to Nazism overnight. The progress from freedom to oppression happens in a succession of baby steps, each of which are tolerated, or even supported.

You have mentioned your view is a minority opinion. Quite the contrary. You form the silent majority who assents to this sort of state behaviour. Your opinion is very closely aligned with the opinion of the power structure itself, and this baneful behaviour can only come about if the vast majority of people are essentially ok with it. The people complaining about it, although loud and visible, are a minority, who have long been accused of being "crackpots" or having a "penchant for conspiracy theories", to use your words.

I don't understand this belief. Since the 90's, we've lived in a world without a nuclear armed superpowers with a hostile relationship. Trade has made war so costly that developed nations just don't do it with each other anymore. More Americans die trying to end civil wars in other countries than die from terrorism. At this point, we should be reaping a peace dividend not only in dollars, but in rights.

Members of Congress have tried to justify the revelations about spying on Americans by claiming that it has prevented a terrorist attack. If a decade of spying on Americans prevents just one 9/11-scale attack, I'd choose the attack. Three thousand deaths over a decade is a rounding error. Let's start a war on traffic accidents and metabolic syndrome instead.

I don't think this is true. A great book that discusses this is Stephen Pinker's "The Better Angels of our Nature," which essentially shows that we're living in the least violent, most peaceful era of human history. Fareed Zakaria's "The Post-American World" also discusses how we're currently in the most peaceful, economically prosperous time in world history. Despite the violence and unrest presented daily in news media, life is far better now than it used to be by almost any metric.

That's why I agree with the people referenced in Sam's second footnote, who believe "the amount of effort spent on the war on terror is disproportionate to the actual risk." As terrible as the September 11 attacks were, ten times as many people die in car accidents every year. David Foster Wallace's brief essay, "Just Asking," really hits this point [1].

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/just-ask...;

But certainly it should be possible to say something or otherwise have a timeframe after which it's considered safe to mention.

And for the rest, the data collection, analysis, etc. absolutely we need more transparency. The bad guys should already be assuming NSA sees all and knows all, the rest of us need to know what rules the government and public are playing by, and we need to be able to trust and oversee our own leadership in Washington. And that requires transparency.