The NSA has reveled in the joy of invading our privacy, has undermined our ability to hold a secret (by intentionally weakening/undermining cryptography), paid its employees outrageous salaries, and is a caricature of George Orwell's "Big Brother"[1] - surpassing even the Stasi of Soviet Russia in its pervasiveness. The Patriot Act (among others) needs to be repealed. Period.
But that will never happen, because bureaucracy doesn't shrink. Period.
This explains my libertarian-leanings --> laws aren't written by the people, they are written by those who stand to benefit most directly from their passing. And the devil of a bill is always in its details, which laymen (sometimes even the congressman presenting the bill) can't understand/decipher. Read the Pulitzer-prize winning biography "The Powerbroker" if you want a lesson in how to abuse the public's ignorance through the cunning drafting of legislation. There is no CTRL-Z in DC.
There are movements, gaining traction, to introduce state-sponsored "internets" - because this is the path we have prescribed to the world. Yet such a profound outcome was not mindfully chosen by the people, it was incidental to the law.
We therefore have forfeited the greatest invention of our time through our collective lack of understanding and/or vulnerable&reactionary mindsets.
I'll be spending the rest of my life ruminating on this simple fact: the internet is sick, and my government is the disease.
[1] - And now that caricature-metaphor has a literal face, drawn by one of NSA's own--if you ever wanted to know what Big Brother "looked like."