[visarga]

Are you living in a fantasy? It's not just the NSA - all governments do electronic surveillance. And even if USA didn't, there would still be surveillance on the American public by other powers.

Besides states, there is a growing number of companies that engage in surveillance - search engines, social sites, defense contractors, companies supplying MPAA IP addresses to sue, etc.

We are in a world where there are many parties doing surveillance. The cat is really out of the bag.

NSA can just say: ok, suppose we stop surveillance - then we can't defend you against other countries doing surveillance on us. It's an arms race and it doesn't matter who started it.