More Americans see man who leaked NSA secrets as 'patriot' than traitor

This is so narrow minded in my opinion. Snowden has done something good to the world, because US administration is secrectly messing with everybody around the globe.

Stop considering it happened only within US borders or as an internal matter. US and US media still are using a group (country) scale reduction to draw some bad opinion on Snowden, divide and gain some people to this spying dementia.

If you look on an international scale, the trivial question would be : hero or villain, and the answer is quite obvious.

AAaaaand somebody is knocking on my door...

In the U.S., the idea was that its founding legal document, the Constitution, would put some very strict limits on the power of government. Thus, there would be many things the government could never do, like restrict one's freedom of speech or unreasonably search and seize a person's belongings or effects. A process was included to amend the Constitution in the future if that was ever necessary, but as one would expect, it takes a very large amount of agreement to do that.

Under these strict limits, three different branches of government would often work adversarially to keep one another in check. The Congress would make laws, but it had no power to enforce them. If the Congress was not happy with the execution of a law, they could repeal it. The President would execute the law and set up a system to enforce the law, but could not change the law and was not given the power to interpret the law or determine whether the law had been broken. The judiciary would interpret how the law applied to specific situations, determine whether law was being followed, and make sure new law complied with the country's ultimate law.

In theory, each branch doesn't have enough coercion to abuse it, and the other branches can stop the excess of a single branch.

It appears, however, that currently this isn't the case in the United States. The executive branch interprets the law to mean whatever it wants the law to mean. Then it claims "national security" at every attempt to subject those interpretations to judicial review. And it doesn't tell Congress its interpretation of the law or how it's carrying out the law. The Congress and judiciary aren't acting adversarially enough to restore the desired balance

Can this be prevented or corrected? Is it really a workable solution? I think we may be about to find out...

It's an interesting framing but I don't think a correct one.

To the question itself, in some areas the government should absolutely know less than other groups/individuals. My wife should know a lot more about me than the government does, and she does very little data mining.

To the framing, though, just as there's a tremendous difference between "follow that car" and "follow every car" (http://www.schneier.com/essay-109.html), there's a tremendous difference between "knowing what Google knows" and "knowing what Google knows plus what Facebook knows plus what Apple knows plus what Twitter knows plus what Verizon knows plus ...".

I keep thinking about how in some Asian and Middle Eastern countries, the same things have been going on (if not more overt), and I wonder if their citizens have as much apathy as ours?