Well said. There are some exceptionally hateful things openly said by those in power (especially in the US) that face no repercussions. It isn't a stretch to imagine similar people working within the intelligence community. Perhaps they don't work there today but there's nothing stopping them working there tomorrow. Again the US has a history of abusive surveillance, the FBI has a very checkered past to say the least. I especially don't like what I'm hearing about the relationship between the DEA and the Mexican drug cartels. We really must not be complacent about abuses by these organizations. By the time it is indisputable that they have been subverted, it will probably be too late to change them.
And my adopted UK is pretty much worst in class, with GCHQ proudly bragging they have less oversight than the NSA.
My problem is not that I think the NSA is doing more than everyone else wants to, but that they're doing more than everyone else have the capability to, and that it is profoundly dangerous:
Not because the NSA wants a "New World Order". I think they genuinely wants to do good. The problem is that wanting to do good and creating a machinery that makes abuses both today and in the future exceedingly easy can overlap substantially.
It never starts out with some cartoonish evil guy twiddling his cartoon-evil mustache and plotting to take over the world. It starts out with people who see themselves as good doing things they see as good and which probably mostly isn't being abused, and who are seeing good things come out of occasional small steps over the line.
And then the line moves. It starters with the creation of a "us vs them" group dynamic that lets you start to write of criticism as suspicious activity, because obviously you're on the side of good so why are people so critical?
Most of the worst dictatorships known to man came out of well-meaning groups wanting to do good.
This is why the uproar is warranted: Because we have the freedom to do so. Because we still have reason to believe that the people in charge is doing this not because they want to be evil, but because they think they're doing the right thing. Because it is vitally important to take the fight now, while it is possible to address this with peaceful, democratic means.
Because we don't want to wake up one day to find someone has decided that "doing good" has regressed to the state of the height of US interventionism, which is not more than a few decades in the past, and find another government has been overthrown because it didn't suit US interests, and another people suffering under a US friendly dictator as a result.