There is a real lesson here about just how cavalier the American government - and to some degree the public - is about civil liberties, but that isn't the biggest problem.
The problem here isn't even so much the government is being shady - that has happened before, it will happen again. I can understand people not feeling threatened by constant snooping even though I disagree.
To me the real problem is how effectively the government has kept this subject from creeping into the public debate. The scary part is the secret laws and precedents that elected officials aren't allowed to even tell their constituents about. Government officials are not reliable; this is far to much unaccountable power even if people involved were allowed to discuss what is happening.
Why aren't the not-technically-interesting parts of this wiretapping program legal for government agencies to talk about? If they need to be hidden, why not go straight to the logical conclusion and classify a bunch of other laws?
Democracies can't handle this level of secrecy. The whole thing is going to fall apart one way or another - the path America is going down isn't stable at all; something is going to have to change radically. Either the intelligence agencies will gain supremacy over the government, the government itself will go rogue or the secrecy will have to end.
EDIT I'm going to bed before I see the whole video, but around 1:46:00 - the bit with J. Clapper. Case in point that the whole system of checks and balances can't work.
EDIT2 And around 2:10:00. Barbaric stuff; it is like centuries of accumulated Common Law and parliamentary legal tradition never happened. People need to be able to occasionally talk about this stuff in formal setting.