I agree - securing one's privacy is an incredibly important problem. That said, none of the leaks show any technology that wasn't publicly known beforehand (e.g.: packet sniffing, man-in-the-middle attacks, stored personal records obtained from internet/telecommunications companies, etc.). The fact that these are used on a much larger scale might be surprising to some, but not novel. We've known for a long time that large, well-funded intelligence organizations operate on a much larger scale than any lone or small group of hackers could. If you worry about your privacy on the internet, the solutions to these problems were known beforehand (e.g.: encrypt your traffic, authenticate those you communicate with, limit personal data stored in the cloud, etc.).

Claiming that the NSA is an active threat to the privacy of Americans without the evidence to back it up is counter-productive. Schneier himself has written quite a bit about the importance of properly identifying your threats in the process of establishing good security. I guarantee that spokeo.com and similar sites have more dossiers on Americans that the NSA does, and I'd be willing to bet that information from those sites have been used more frequently for nefarious purposes against ordinary citizens. The NSA has the capability to target you - this leads to overblown articles making the leap from "the NSA collects massive amounts of metadata" to "the NSA collects massive amounts of American's metadata", incendiary discussion forums calling for the immediate shutdown of the NSA, imprisonment of top NSA officials, fear mongering about the NSA brought up in situations that have nothing to do surveillance, etc. What they don't have is the motive (seeing as how they're an agency charged with the gathering of foreign intelligence) or legal authority to spy on Americans. The evidence stating that they are actively spying on Americans just isn't there. Until credible evidence shows that NSA is invading the privacy of ordinary people, I'm going to worry about the credible threats.

It creeps me out that I can Google my name and find 6 different websites willing to sell me my current and previous addresses, e-mail address, phone numbers, names of family members, etc. that they harvested from public records; it bothers me that anyone with a Pineapple device can trick my cell phone into connecting to actively hostile network if I forget to turn off the Wifi; it bothers me that I can turn on Collusion in Firefox and see that my browsing activity is reported to 40 different companies across every web page I surf to unless I turn off Javascript and frequently delete all of my cookies; it scares me that I get spam e-mail sent from the compromised accounts of people I know personally that tries to redirect me to malicious web sites; two years ago someone got my debit card number and pulled a little over $2000 out of a bank in Shenzhen - I worry about the security of sites I purchase from over the internet, which ATMs I draw from, what that waiter is doing when he disappears after I hand him my card. I consider myself a pretty paranoid person. At this point I don't feel threatened by the NSA (if I worked for a foreign government I would probably have a different opinion).

I'm going to continue using every reasonable means to protect the privacy and integrity of data. I'm not going to do it because of the NSA - I'm going to do it because the internet is a security nightmare, and there are lots of people out there who would do lots of things to my data without any regard to my well being.