>They want the US to be actively preventing the next Boston Marathon bombing or 9/11. And are more than happy to give up a small amount of their own privacy in order to do so.

The thing is that these surveillance tools are never enough. They enhance them, and a terrorist act happens, and they start saying that they need more power to prevent something like that in the future. It's baloney.

The only way for them to prevent future crime is to turn the country into an Orwellian dystopia. The thing is that we don't even know how effective these surveillance programs are, since the gov't doesn't release any data. Any time questions of efficacy rise, 'they' say that these programs help catch terrorists, but they don't give any concrete data.

Yeah, I think a person could easily spend enough time on the Internet to get an improper sense of what the American people would like, especially in a case like this.

I for one am not all that upset about what these leaks have shown, and while I'd like for the companies who get ordered to hand over data to announce that they're doing so, I don't mind the actual transfer.

People just don't generally think in terms of, "Have Gmail/Facebook/HackerNews/Reddit, or have privacy."