[pessimizer]

>Mr. Obama was told before his inauguration of a supposed plot by Somali extremists to attack the ceremony[...]. Although the report proved unfounded, it reinforced to Mr. Obama the need to detect threats before they materialized. “The whole Somali threat injected their team into the realities of national security in a tangible and complicated way”[...]

So a non-existent threat was what made Obama decide that the surveillance state was necessary. Great decisionmaking here.