I detest the authority that NSA has claimed over all of us, but I think that surveillance technology must be viewed in a broader context. Marshall McCluhan famously opined that the medium is the message, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the current controversy over how much surveillance the NSA can claim the right to, over the "private" communications of each of us.
I'll start by saying that IMO absolute privacy of communication is a thing of the past. It simply does not exist anymore. Whether we like it or not, that is the current state of affairs.
Domestic spying for political purposes, militaristic CIA actions abroad, secret espionage activities and so on have been operational and influential long before the internet age, so it should come as no surprise that they continue to be active now, using whatever technology is available to them.
There has been however, a paradigm shift in the nature of communication itself, brought about by the World Wide Web, for which nobody was prepared. Not the MIC, not the Libertarians, not the Progressives, not the Conservatives, not nobody.
The essence of this shift is that private communications no longer exist... or if they exist at all, they only exist temporarily and provisionally, rather than absolutely. And that the vast majority of all human communications are now inextricably entwined in a global electronic web of data, from which there is no escape.
In a way, this renders NSA's surreptitious activities almost moot, regardless of how malign its intentions might, or might not be. When the sea of data becomes as vast as it has become, when literally everyone's profile is available to anyone else, of what use then is surveillance?