The public can’t decide what they want  Sadly, we reached a point in our desperate quest for perfection where the population, through its mutually exclusive demands, has ended up putting the government between a rock and an anvil. The population then blames the government for not being able to fulfill these demands, when actually we are at fault.  We demand our government protects us from terrorists, criminal organizations and in general people who want to harm us. If it fails to do this job, we blame it and throw dirt at it for being inefficient. But what we see is that although the state has the power to launch a full campaign against wrong-doers through electronic surveillance means, we deny him the possibility of doing that. If, by chance, the government is breaking this law when trying to stop and prevent crimes from happening, like in the example of the NSA, again we launch meaningless offenses and start accusing state agencies for being too intrusive. This fickleness is shown by polling; in 2010 47% of Americans thought that anti-terror programs had not gone far enough to protect the country, three years later that figure had dropped to 35% while those thinking the programs restrict liberties had risen from 32% to 47% with little change in how much was actually being done.(1)  (1) “Few See Adequate Limits on NSA Surveillance Program” July 26, 2013