Furthermore since Snowden's revelations has resulted in basically zero change to the status quo (no legislation, no change in policies, no change in diplomatic relations, no mass uprising by the public) you have to imagine he's wondering what the whole point of it was.
It's only been 5-6 weeks, how fast were you expecting things to happen? The Watergate scandal took over two years to unfold even though many of the major revelations took place during a general election campaign.
I actually think the problem is the messaging. Rather than argue specific policy changes e.g. "ban monitoring of social media" or "transparent FISA courts" opponents have opted for the vague and somewhat vapid "restore the fourth".
You have absolutely no proof of that. If you'd read anything about the NSA, the history of it, or paid any attention at all, you'd know that to be false. Even if you were a casual observer of the situation, it would be foolish to make such a statement in defense of the NSA.
I agree with you about the messaging, and don't think the fourth amendment has ever supplied the broad privacy protection that its boosters seem to imagine. I think we need a more explicit privacy amendment, but haven't really thought about how to effectively promote this idea so far.
Sometimes getting the public to accept a particular argument is not the hard part, it's laying out the alternatives factually in a way that shows the public how they contrast.
I find it very difficult to argue positions that take extremes of the type you laid out. I would also agree that vague notions are a waste of time.
Even with the revelations in 2004 and '05, it was clear that the focus of the program was traffic analysis by completely automated means, and we should have been willing to legislate the extent to which we will allow that activity in public laws in the public domain. The role of the FISC should be to allow for warrants in very uncommon cases of foreign espionage or international terrorism, not as a general mechanism to allow the presentation and consideration of secret evidence. And it doesn't end with that court, the state secret privilege has been used commonly and repeatedly (see the work of Steven Aftergood for more details) to quash cases that the government considers inconvenient, and the Congress has essentially wiped away the complicity of common carriers in violating their implied assurance of the privacy of voice communication. The President called, after these revelations, but nonetheless, for a renewed and expanded debate of these tradeoffs. Do we consider this over now that the broadcast and print media (of all political stripes) have left it alone? Have we now decided that the American people have accepted this as the new normal and moved on?
At every opportunity we conflate the mostly benign traffic analysis and ignore the very real threat (by those we call government) of a persistent and permanent archive of all of our most private conversations. These tools in the wrong hands would be devastating to any free people, placing so many of us in deadly danger of a government that may take our past words as proof of our treason. This is not theory, this is history. (The traffic analysis would also contribute to the ends of such a government, where guilt by association may be sufficient for punishment.)
Isn't Snowden's whole point that it really just looks like that on paper? Really, nothing prevents determined insiders from doing what they want.
