> That people don't think their actions are evil doesn't prove that their actions aren't evil.

Certainly not. The issue is not their beliefs, but rather the reasoning behind them. Different experiences of the world give rise to different world views. The world view of those that operate, condone, and approve the surveillance arises from a set of historical understandings and modern experiences that neither you nor I share.

To suggest that the scare tactics of CNN and the like is comparable to the psychological effect upon an ordinary analyst of regular intelligence reports of weapons-grade uranium being smuggled out of Russia via Kazakhstan is naive at best.

The threat of true national annihilation, not a specter concocted by a manipulative elite, has been the norm rather than the exception throughout history.

Modern totalitarianism has its roots in a not too distant past in which totalitarianism was the surest defense against large armed groups of humans that would burn your fields, kill your family, and subjugate your people.

That threat didn't disappear until very recent times. The cultural history of the American people is replete with threats to our existence: the CCCP and Warsaw Pact, the Axis, the German Empire, Spanish colonial North American empires, the British Empire, the Quadruple Alliance, the Normans. The intelligence community takes it's cues from a long history of existential threats.

What seems so obvious to us is that the current world is stable, and thus extraordinary measures to protect our safety aren't justified. Those charged with national security take a longer view. They see our nation as balanced on a knife's edge between internal strife and external threats. And thus, threats to either must be vigilant observed, documented, and understood, so that if the time should come when a conflict does occur, we stand prepared.

That line of reasoning is often alien to privacy advocates. I neither endorse it nor deny it. I simply acknowledge that those who study, train, and practice for our defense are not naive when it comes to the risk of violating civilian privacy. They simply set a different value to each of the variables in the risk-reward equation. You may disagree with those values, but it is important to understand them. Blindly denouncing such views as morally bankrupt simply factually incorrect.

> The Berlin wall didn't fall until 1989. The Soviet Union didn't dissolve until 1991. The period of 1991-2001 was spent fighting proxy wars in former USSR terrories or allies [1]. Iraq. The Yugoslav Wars in Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo. Haiti. All of this was an extension of the cold war.

The wars you cited were in no way related to the Cold War. Yugoslavia was a strategically unimportant area, relevant to no one in the geopolitical sphere.

The intervention occurred as a direct result of ethnic cleansing that was taking place in obvious, organized, and deliberate fashion. To suggest otherwise is simply incorrect. I've spoken with the head of UNPROFOR from the Srebrenica Massacre. It was a war crime on par with the worst parts of World War II. Clinton himself stated that his reluctance to intervene was based upon the "ancient ethnic hatreds" argument of Balkan Ghosts. The Yugoslavian intervention was about genocide. As a simple fact, it had nothing to do with the Cold War.

> Communism continued to be a spectre held over the head of the American public. It's just the discourse shifted from "the USSR has bombs that can kill us right now" to "Communism is bad therefore we're preventing it from spreading".

Containment of communism was simply not a factor during the nineties. Moscow was crushed, the former Soviet block in shambles, and Russian interests retreating from throughout the world. Hence the remarkable cooperation on nuclear arms, energy policy, and democratization between the Yeltsin administration and the Clinton administration.

>I don't want to Godwin the discussion here... Again avoiding Godwinning...

I believe the Romans had a term for emphasis by pretended omission.

> to a certain extent you must demonize the individuals. Else there is no incentive for people to be vigilant of runaway ideology, like the US is operating under currently. Else there is no incentive for individuals to formulate a moral compass external to the state, because why bother when "they told me to do it" is a legitimate excuse? The state idology becomes your morality. After all, you're just tryin' to put food on your family.

In a totalitarian state, this argument would indeed hold water. However, you gloss over the most significant part of the counterargument. We didn't simply allow extraordinary efforts against terrorism, the people of the United States overwhelming endorsed it.

A democracy is beholden to its people. Its morality is, by definition, derived from the consent of the governed as expressed through the democratic process. Vox populi, vox dei, as it were. To point fingers at talented and intelligent programmers, people with whom we would be excellent allies and friends in other circumstances, excuses the true culprits: us.

We are to blame for this leviathan. Not the NSA, not Obama, not Bush, not the DNI, DIA, CIA, FBI, or any other amorphous acronym.

We need to understand the reasoning of the those that built these programs, not simply dismiss them as callous power hungry sociopaths. We need to grasp the history that informed their reasoning, both recent and that which began far before that day in September.

Most importantly, we need to remember that blaming individuals does nothing to prevent the true failure, a systematic disregard for the right to privacy and the guarantees thereof provided by the Constitution.