>At one point or another, this argument for civil liberties gets repetitive and overblown. No one I know has ever felt like their freedoms were at stake
Really? Make that one person, but there are surely more.
>Who are we to judge corruption, and what sources of information do we really have?
Who are a bunch of flawed humans to judge anything? Physics operates on a totally open system of merit. Economics as well. Doctors are directly responsible to reality. These are sciences. Government is not a science, and it is an intention of the system that the people should be able to evaluate it. From The Federalist #51:
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."
Incidentally, we do not "leave medicine to the doctors" in any realistic sense -- there are numerous byzantine legal controls on the medical profession, such as, for example, the FDA. To "leave medicine to the doctors" would be to abolish the FDA, medical malpractice litigation, patient privacy laws, etc.
>Hacking into their servers, getting people fired (and therefore replacing them with less experienced people), and leaking sensitive information so the uneducated public can get their opinions in, is -NOT- going to solve anything. At all. Ever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers
Ultimately, experience is not a guarantee of competence or even a strong indicator in most fields, be it physics or government. Programming is a notable exception.
>I don't agree with a lot of the things that various government organizations are allegedly doing either. However, I also understand that I probably don't have all the facts. I also know that even if I had all the facts, I would probably not commit much time to analyzing all of them, in order to make a sound decision on the best course of action. Why don't other people realize this?
I realize it about you, specifically. Would you argue that because of their positions, the heads of the DEA and TSA are necessarily more competent than the vast number of medical, legal, and security experts who argue that their actions are often unnecessary and unjustified? There are people outside the government capable -- perhaps superbly so -- of analyzing the merit of government action.
It is also somewhat if not extremely naive to assume that government officials make decisions from a competent and ethical stance, and that "mistakes" are indeed a result of circumstances rather than malice or neglect. Is it naive to assume a majority of legislators are corrupt? It doesn't matter -- it is possible to look at the evidence, so assumptions are largely unnecessary. When a serious Presidential contender argues that Paul Revere rode to "warn the British", the legitimacy of government can scarcely be assumed.