Well, you're sort of angry about this, which is good I guess. If there's anything in the US to be angry about right now it's this stuff. But anyway, you misunderstand. I'm not making an argument, like you said several times, and certainly not offering my post as a counter to what you said. I actually originally typed it up as a reply to the OP, but felt it made a bit more sense added on to your post.

I'm just adding something to the discussion, and that is this: we often end up having to weigh immediate safety (and yes, that's what the NSA will say they're giving you by pinging emails for 'bomb'; if anyone actually believes that is inconsequential to them) versus a future loss of privacy. Or, especially, we end up being told that's what is happening.

I'm saying that's a very hard concept to explain to people, and that dichotomy is difficult to assess if you're Obama, or his NSC, etc. "Privacy" has become a buzzword, an excuse, and I think that's wrong, precisely because it leads to the same argument being made in the cases of two wildly different things -- in this instance the NSA's snooping and streetcorner surveillance. This inevitably weakens the argument.

(Also -- a) it's good to put someone in jail who is morally okay with driving drunk and then leaving the scene of a crime, and b) cameras prevent crime, theoretically***. If we had never had streetlights, muggings would be more frequent, and adding streetlights may not stop a mugging that's already happened, but it sure does prevent new ones.)