You have to generally assume that the FBI and other government agencies are competent. My baseline, starting assumption is that if everyone in the US was too scared to use programs like PRISM, they wouldn't have been built.
So these kinds of claims just don't make any sense in a world where we know that government has conducted surveillance without a warrant, and where we know that the FBI has built entire programs designed to make it easier for them to conduct surveillance without a warrant.
From the article posted that you're replying to:
> What Administration officials tend to obscure is that what they seek is not immunity for future cooperation with lawful surveillance, but rather telecom immunity for assisting with unlawful surveillance conducted from October 2001 through January 17, 2007, as part of the warrantless wiretap program initiated by the White House.
I'm not sure I understand what your implication is. I don't understand how it's possible to respond to an article that is about telecoms seeking immunity for previous unlawful actions by saying, "the government/businesses would be way too scared to do anything unlawful." I mean... obviously not, they sought immunity for it. They wouldn't just randomly do that, the most likely explanation is that they made immunity a pressing issue because they thought they needed it.
It does not seem to me that the optimistic world you describe and the observable actions and lobbying efforts of companies/administrations line up with each other.