1) That's not what I said at all. For someone who likes to throw the term "straw man" at others, you certainly seem to enjoy constructing them.

First, I did not say constant. There's a lot of ground between no oversight (as you paropose) and constant oversight (which you pretend is the only alternative).

Second, I was talking about oversight of government wiretaps, not oversight of citizens' lives. There's a rather significant different between eavesdropping and making sure that no one is eavesdropping.

Third, the government does provide oversight for mine and everyone else's actions, and they do it even without wiretaps. They call it police work. The police provide oversight so that abuses are not unbounded. When you say that there should be no oversight for wiretapping until someone complains, the civilian parallel is that police should take no actions except in the face of reported crime. AKA, no crime prevention.

Fifth, no, it's not ironic.

2) It's not an either-or situation. This is like saying that if you run a company, you shouldn't attempt to improve your divisions directly. Sure, if you've got a consistently-underperforming division, the right thing might be to let it go entirely. But that doesn't mean that acceptably-performing or even exceptionally-performing divisions cannot perform better. If a division is wasting money on stupid things, you can and should simply say "stop doing that". Firing everyone is not a net gain most of the time. (Especially in a world where every division is doing stupid things. Firing every government agency that wastes money is the same as disbanding the government.)

3) Wait, am I to understand that in your fantasy world where the government never abuses private information, they do restrict speech? The government that never blackmails because it's "illegal" will forbid speech, which is apparently not "illegal"?

How do you seriously reconcile these views? How to you simultaneously believe in a government that will always do the right thing with respect to privacy and also a government that will restrict speech and enforce a totalitarian state?

4) If you want to compare email spam mitigation to wiretapping, then maybe you should realize that without spam filtering, false positives do not happen. Mail is not "presumed spam" in the case where no spam filtering takes place. On the other hand, with spam filtering, false positives are inevitable. And that's okay, so long as 1) the rate of false positives is sufficiently low, and 2) it's emails going in the spam folder and not humans going to jail.

5) You haven't tried looking very hard if the only privacy issues you can find are with Facebook. More to the point, if you dig in even a little bit, you'll see that many of the privacy concerns with Facebook are based on the fact that after Facebook collects everything possible about your personal life, the government can subpoena that info.

And yes, I found many answers, some of which I already listed. If you land on the no-fly list because of something the government heard you say, that's an important problem. If a government agent blackmails you because of something they intercepted about you, that's an important problem. If you can't speak publicly against the government out of fear that they will leak sensitive information about you, that's an important problem.

Stop pretending that privacy is not important. Or at least prove that you believe what you claim by publicly posting your full name, address, date of birth, employer, social security number, mother's maiden name, credit and debit card numbers with expiration dates and security codes, driver's license number, bank account numbers (with routing info, please), online account usernames and passwords, your present and past sexual partners, any diseases you or your immediate family have, and the last 5 years of tax returns. Absent that, I'm afraid your claim that privacy is not important is rather an obvious sham.