First they came for the Whistleblowers, and I did not speak out

Americans tend to see things through party politics and identity anyway - and as such, you'll see a much bigger uproar over things like Obamacare and gun legislation after Newtown than you likely ever will over this, because this is such a new phenomenon that the party controllers are only now coming up with ways to either take credit or lay blame. Most Americans don't care about this, at worse it's a drama that plays out now and then on the news, and a minor inconvenience when they fly. It's a nonevent.

And there have been protests, and hearings, and what have you - but if what you're expecting is violence in the streets, if you're expecting a revolution like Syria - that's not going to happen.

"Trust us, everything is fixed now. No, we can't go into detail for national security reasons."

No, absolutely not, violence would only set this issue back (imagine if the NSA now had a "valid" reason to target people, for inciting violence).

>Most Americans are not aware of their freedoms having been eroded in any meaningful way.

People need to see that their freedoms have been eroded which is one of the major issues, which is why their needs to be peaceful assembly and people making noise so that the average American fully understands the extent of the NSA's breach of privacy and civil liberties.

> that they will be rounded up by a government death squad because looking at Boing Boing pushed their XKeyScore rating past the red line.

Sure people aren't being rounded up by a government death squad, but tracking peoples every movements via phone and every single detail on their online personas is an incredible breach of privacy and civil liberties. It's only a matter of time until it escalates and you have to remove a weed before it takes hold in your garden, while it's still small enough to manage.

>Most Americans don't care about this

Then it needs to become an issue that Americans care about by the people who do understand how terrible the actions of the NSA are (in this case, most HN readers)

Many people I know think what the NSA is doing is completely wrong, but they have problems logging into facebook and getting their email to work, they just feel powerless because they don't understand the technology behind the world they live in.

How can they stand up to something they can't even begin to comprehend?

The NSA could literally do anything they wanted to most people and they wouldn't even know about it.

And then we have a much smaller group of people in the tech industry (most people who frequent Hacker News), who know what the NSA is doing is horribly horribly wrong, but are afraid of being destroyed financially, socially, and professionally for standing up to them.

It feels like swimming up a waterfall. The NSA can so easily ruin lives by planting illegal material on your computer, then tip off the local cops who get a search warrant, then they seize your computer and find the illegal material on your computer.

And you life is ruined.

I mean, they are so powerful technologically speaking, they can ruin lives without so much as lifting a finger.

It's very scary and very real.

>They're probably watching everything you do with total impunity.

I'd rather ere on the side of rationality here and without any evidence to the contrary I'm going to doubt any systems exist that are as large and thorough as the NSA's in my own country.