Maybe I am reading this wrong, but my impression is that you are saying that people should not feel indignant now because the US has a history of similar overreaches. If that’s the case, I don’t agree with that stance. We did know that The Bush administration was copying all AT&T internet traffic for a time, but we did not have clear evidence that it continued. We also did not have evidence, particularly evidence confirmed by the government, of massive coordination by the plurality of major internet companies that provide email, search and other messaging and storage technologies. Before this week, I did believe that the NSA probably needed a court order to get my emails from Google. I did not know that Google was providing them to the NSA a priori.

Nevertheless, even if there were smoke that people should have picked up on earlier, before last week, alleging that the US was doing just this would have been met with disbelief in the wider media. It would have been labeled as unfounded paranoia.

The PRISM revelations, and the government confirmation, has provided us proof of a very large scope program, and signals not only the direction that the US is taking, but that while Obama once felt he had to campaign on a different position, from here on out, total information awareness is to be a non-issue. With this story and the Obama administration’s response, the US surveillance narrative is moving from scattered evidence of abuse to the normalization of a police state.