No, I don't think we should just "realize" that. By all means, let's have a discussion; but to accept a priori that some form of surveillance is acceptable reeks of an outlook that has already given up. We should not be fearful and dependent, but rather willing to accept danger as the price of no one looking over our shoulders.

I am specifically arguing that we do not (should not) accept a priori the premise that surveillance is not necessarily bad.

To do so is to capitulate the entire argument against surveillance, and reduce our fight for privacy to nothing more than weighing lesser evils.

Is it? Please demonstrate it by listing terrorist incidents prevented or active terrorists caught due to surveillance other than narrowly-targeted police investigation, or military action in an active combat zone.

To qualify, the use of broad surveillance should be a necessary component of the investigation, i.e. the investigation would not have started or reached the conclusion it did without it. If some of these exist but they're all classified, that's problematic from the perspective of democracy because it prevents the public from making an informed decision about their merit.

It is if you're not going to accept a priori the claim that surveillance can be justified. If you need to have it demonstrated that surveillance can be justified, the only possible grounds for such a demonstration is to show the people the benefits--the actual harms that surveillance has prevented. If we the people can't see those benefits, how can we possibly judge whether or not surveillance can be justified?

In other words, the government of any free society is in a kind of Catch-22 position with regard to surveillance: it can't be justified to the people without revealing that it's happening and what it's discovering, but revealing those things destroys the usefulness of the surveillance. The only choices are to not permit the surveillance at all, or to accept an unavoidable loss of freedom--as a citizen, you will never be able to know whether the surveillance your government is conducting is justified. You just have to accept it.

"It's too secret to tell the public in broad terms a decade after the investigation is over" strikes me as incompatible with democracy. Questionably-legal surveillance also strikes me as incompatible with democracy outside of short-term use in exceptional emergency conditions, which should be disclosed to the public once the emergency is over.

Fill in the blank, masters. Maximize our security.

If you are interested in negotiating for minor concessions with entities who have demonstrated a willingness to work outside the law (and write new laws where needed), then your pragmatism will boil you slowly.

There are likely forms of eugenics that have the same cost/benefit characteristics as the forms of surveillance to which we've alluded. We know that the legalization of abortion has the long-term effect of reducing crime, so what about laws that make abortions easier to access when the fetus has certain genetic characteristics associated with disabilities? Or with psychopathy? "NO!" is the resounding response. "THAT'S EVIL!" And a good thing too, because it's probably the only reliably way to hold the line against policies that really are murderously bad. We don't debate practical eugenics. We muse about it in fiction and hypothetical scenarios, but we don't debate it in politics. We reject it because it's wrong. It's wrong because it is.

Surveillance policy should be met with this same sort of rallied opposing force. Write books about it, discuss it in an academic space, try to imagine ways in which it could do more good than bad; fine. But propose surveillance policy in the real world, and the response should be: "NO! THAT'S EVIL!"

You won't find a more powerful force than moral outrage. It doesn't need to be worked around, it needs to be channeled. On the one side, you will have people channeling their outrage towards criminals and terrorists. On the other side, you must have people channeling their outrage towards the idea of using espionage against civilians. A compromise involving "only the good kinds" of surveillance is unacceptable, because it allows the side that's rallying against criminals and terrorists to continue using moral arguments, while the side opposing them is neutered and can only make comparatively weak arguments. It's nearly impossible to successfully argue that something is morally wrong if it's already the status quo. Why is it so easy to say slavery is wrong now when it was so hotly debated in the 17th century? Same question applies to eugenics, once a topic of much political discussion. We're in that boat with surveillance right now. It feels normal to be spied on, and the uncompromising argument that surveillance is totally morally abhorrent in all its forms sounds extreme, and you'd never hear it made by a sitting politician.

Take a look at the past 20 years. Your argument is hollow. Ladens don't keep diaries on Facebook, and foreign spooks don't use email, no, they don't use computers as such.

With the amount of silly foreign policy blunders in between the EU, and the US shows more than anything that US doesn't seem to benefit at all from wiretapping governments of their allies.

That whole premise is invalid.

Also it is not about crime, is about control, for whatever agenda they have now or later. And the lack of Snowden level leaks in 7 years hints at which point they have control now.