Actual liberatory politics begins the day after the election, and involves things like pressure groups, petitions, protests and lobbying.
You see a status quo where neither major party cares about electronic privacy. Is it because there is a vast conspiracy between media and government to only present these two viewpoints? Is it because huge amounts of money go into getting people to support NSA surveillance? Or is it because opposing NSA surveillance is not an issue that reliably yields votes?
Which voting bloc can you capture by supporting the scaling back of NSA surveillance? Angry nerds? Not a big demographic. If your issue doesn't get old people, blacks and hispanics, religious conservatives, teachers, union workers, small business owners, or one of the other big demographics like that to go out and vote based solely on that issue, then there is not enough votes in that issue for any politician to care about it.
And the thing is, that's arguably how democracy should work. Why should politicians in a democracy cater to the pet issues of an ideological minority?
From a human and Constitutional rights point of view, they have an obligation to respect the views of those ideological minorities when their main agenda is defending their rights (right to privacy, free speech, or whatever it may be). A pure democratic system is little more than a (usually peaceful) mob rule, but in a representative democracy there is at least the expectation that elected representatives, by virtue of being middlemen between the people and the laws that govern them, as well as only having to risk their job every few years, will be able to reflect on more than what the majority wants at the present moment.
However, if your point was made more from the perspective of maintaining power and control, then I don't disagree with you.
Ideological minorities don't get to make up "rights" and then demand the government defend them. The government has the obligation to defend free speech rights, even against the wishes of the majority, because there is ancient recognition of that right along with explicit adoption of a broad statement of that right in the Constitution.
But, there is no such thing when it comes to "privacy". See: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/rightof... ("The U. S. Constitution contains no express right to privacy. The Bill of Rights, however, reflects the concern of James Madison and other framers for protecting specific aspects of privacy, such as the privacy of beliefs (1st Amendment), privacy of the home against demands that it be used to house soldiers (3rd Amendment), privacy of the person and possessions as against unreasonable searches (4th Amendment), and the 5th Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination, which provides protection for the privacy of personal information.")
There is nothing in the Constitution that says "you have a right to privacy", and it's really very difficult to extend one of the explicit provisions to get you to something that would prohibit the government's collection of information that you voluntarily put "out in the world" by giving it to entities like Google or Facebook, or information (like call records) that aren't even yours but rather information about you gathered by a private company. You have to resort to something worse than Griswald's "penumbras" to get from the 4th amendment, which concerns the sanctity of one's house and physical person, to such a broad privacy "right."
There's not even intellectual consensus on the issue. Academics disagree vigorously about the appropriate level of "privacy rights" and foreign liberal democracies often collect as much or more information than the U.S. does.
That's just silly, it most certainly is. The word democracy does not mean only direct democracy.
