The Declaration of Independence states that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Gendered language aside, the idea of the founders was clearly that rights derive from one's innate humanity, and do
not derive from government largess. This was the ideal which provided America's inner light; for all of America's mis-steps, the proclamation of this core ideal fanned the flames of some sort of tendency towards goodness.
This ideal is all but gone. Today, the American government baldly proclaims that rights do not belong to human beings, but are conferred only by citizenship. the starkest example of this remains John Yoo's rationale (embraced by the Bush administration) for why the Geneva Convention does not apply to the Taliban: that the rights guaranteed by the Convention were not human rights, but rights granted to combatants of UN member states. Yoo argued that human rights did not exist, and that rights derive solely from citizenship.
To be fair, the roots of that doctrine long preceded the Bush administration, and have continue to grow since. But when I look at framing of debate about rights -- and this applies not only to the NSA spying, but also to the outrage over the fact that the US President would order the drone assassination of, gasp, American citizens (as opposed to the thousands of other non-combatants he has killed in the same way) -- when I see this, it becomes clear that the ideals which inspired the declaration of independence are long since gone.
