A few tens of k's is remarkable. There's a fallacy of thinking "people aren't doing anything about it, therefore they don't care".

In fact, people don't "do something" because they estimate, rightly or wrongly, that they can't do anything that would make a difference. Millions worldwide protested the current US wars when they were getting started, but they went ahead on schedule. What, exactly, can citizens do to effectively influence their government anymore? If people perceive that rule of law is gone, the rational reaction is to "lie low" and hope to get thru these times unnoticed. Those still contacting congress may be old enough to remember a different USA and naive enough to not realize it is gone.

I find it sad, but that is the conclusion I came to, as well.

Tens of thousands caring out of a population of 350 million is 0.03% of the population. That's kinda tepid. But should Paula Deen have been fired from Food Network? Crisis of epic proportions!

You might want to consume different sources of news media. The only times I've heard the name "Paula Deen" was in conversation with my parents and grandparents. I'm sure her travails (whatever they are or were) amount to a crisis for some people, but you don't have to pay attention to those people.

Oh. Your parents and grandparents aren't Americans, then?

Look, if you hang with the hipsters who "consume" better media, then sure, you won't have any clue what the vast majority of the public cares about. It's not surveillance. It's whatever mass opiate has been focus-grouped out for the week.

In the meantime, though, that mass opiate is mainlined into every public space in the land on countless television monitors in essentially every place where a person has to spend more than 30 seconds. They've got no time to think about the future - they've got to be outraged about this week's 15-minute hate, or admire this week's baby, or fear this week's terrorist.

You may simply not visit those downscale places. Good on you. But Washington really doesn't care, except to the extent that you earn more money they can extract or possibly build more centralized data processing services they can mine.

Vivtek's point was that most people don't care about this, and consider the Paula Deen incident far more noteworthy.

That may have been true for whichever couple of days the talking heads devoted to the unfortunate Ms. Dean, but it simply isn't borne out over the long haul. If you look really hard, I doubt you can find a single piece about Dean that was produced today, while most outlets have several about Snowden.

You can't find a piece about Paula Deen today because the attention has shifted to Prince George. Which, by the way, is exactly the point: While there are people who care about Snowden, NSA, etc., they are not currently any kind of substantial part of the public. We all ignore that at our peril.

The fact that Snowden may be a larger-than-normal individual news story doesn't change the fact that the story doesn't capture public attention in the face of the multitudes of other news stories continually cropping up and then going away again.

Prince Who? Look, I'm an American. We fought several wars to confirm that we don't have to give a flying fuck about King George III or any of his syphilitic inbred descendants.

Not even 500 people made it out to support the July 4 protest of the NSA, in a country where tens of thousands of people will turn out to oppose gay marriage.

Depending on what polls you read, a majority of Americans think the NSA policy is acceptable: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/most-americans-suppor.... ("Overall, 56 percent of Americans consider the NSA’s accessing of telephone call records of millions of Americans through secret court orders 'acceptable,' while 41 percent call the practice 'unacceptable.')

The real news here is that Congress reacted more strongly than the public!

Maybe that's because they know how this power can and will be used against them. What's the likelihood of this blackmail power being used against an ordinary citizen? Very low (why bother?). Against a congressman? Well...