[comex]

HTTPS does help with government surveillance. It won't save you if the NSA is targeting you individually, to the point where they're prepared to use targeted active exploits whose detection and identification would cost them both technically and PR-wise... but it will prevent (some of) your data from being passively vacuumed up en masse along with everyone else's, which for most people is a more pressing concern.

Well, unless the NSA has some magic passive SSL strip attack, which is not out of the question, but very unlikely.