You then postulate the US government just ignoring the law altogether.
You see the pattern right? All these are things where the US government does some questionably legal, pretty highly visible stuff to you. It's not unintrusive electronic surveillance.
Or to put it another way: the Soviet government didn't start out surveilling their citizens before they just murdered all the ones who were considered dissidents. They started doing it after they needed to get better at murdering the dissidents. But the real problem, was the fact the government was willing to murder dissidents. Has the US government killed a bunch of your neighbors? Disappeared them?
No, he just mentioned things that could be currently done. However, only on a small scale. To truly disrupt anyone's life like that, and to do that for thousands or millions of suspects or dissidents or what have you, you would need an equal amount of auditors, cops, and so forth.
Now, if you were to automate that schema, you would have yourself a system capable of much more. And by doing it illegally to the extant that even elected representatives are not allowed to have oversight, you could achieve a very great deal.
>was the fact the government was willing to murder dissidents. Has the US government killed a bunch of your neighbors? Disappeared them?
Two arguments. 1) The signs are that we are eroding the legal safeguards that at least made it very difficult and very risky to do this. Now, however, dissidents (call them traitors if you will, that is your opinion) can be whisked to secure holding facilities the world over and subjected to torture, and it is technically legal. US citizens can be assassinated legallly. And now we hear that we have been watched for decades, illegally. Clapper commits perjury, but walks free. Torturers are given clemency, but Snowden is wanted for esponiage. All of this tells me that currently, our freedom is a facade, and soon even that will be able to be dispensed with.
2) You could subscribe to the view that we don't need to be murdered or dissapeared, just convinced that keeping our mouths shut and our eyes on the TV are the safest option. Pepperspraying OWS protesters, militarising the police - I can see why political engagement is dropping, and I'm sure you know who benefits from that. Hint: not us.
"Has the US government killed a bunch of your neighbors? Disappeared them?"
No, not yet. However, I believe there's a "there" there with the IRS scandals, which is definitely headed in that direction very, very strongly. Which is to say, it's riding your line, it crosses a lot of other more realistic lines already.
Your faith in human nature is disarmingly naive. Remember Hitler has been elected. What keeps a democracy alive is not the people at its head or the people that elect their rulers but the structural foundations and laws. You can't trust men. Most of these foundations and laws have already been circumvented by the NSA with the benediction of the US government. That the government seems "nice" to you doesn't matter. As soon as the rulers can disregard laws, they will.
Easy. You use government power on them. You "coincidentally" hit them with an IRS audit, one that's incredibly hostile and refuses to resolve itself. You hit their business with every inspection possible, held to the most stringent of standards. Even if, and perhaps especially if, they don't own it, and you find a way to sufficiently hint to the business why exactly they're having these troubles. You have a cop follow them and nail them with every petty infraction in the book. Any government program they may be on, you inspect their compliance to the n-th degree. Layer heavy bureaucratic red tape on at every opportunity. Find ways to make them need a lawyer. Find a petty excuse to claim you suspect them of drug trafficking and inspect everything they own, which basically allows you to take everything they own, and effectively destroy or hold on to everything for years.
And that's if you have a goal of staying plausibly legal. If the mask is off for some reason, there's even more you can do. And these are just examples; if one truly took a survey of what the government could do to you without even stretching the law, I think we could produce a very thick and scary book.
Unfortunately, I don't think the capabilities of the NSA are bounded by your imagination.