Tech-savvy people often miss the forest for the trees on this one. Once you get past the engrossment in implementation details, the fundamentalist political philosophizing, and the harping on spurious and mostly anecdotal evidence for Western police states, there actually is good reason for government surveillance of W/Obama scale. There is a distinct threat that global terror will increase in scope by orders of magnitude, due to a) gains in message efficacy, b) positive feedback loops for recruitment (i.e., bombing Iraq over and over again), c) weapon availability gains, d) geopolitical posturing, or e) a black swan. Of what has been revealed from Snowden's leaks, the worst intentional (read: potentially malicious) invasion of privacy was NSA employees making fun of tapped conversations. If that and you not being able to torrent 24-bit flacs off of what.cd is the cost we have to pay for security in a future which is less certain than is widely acknowledged, sign me up.