Why, thank you for calling me an authoritarian bastard! It is an exquisite capstone of my day! Why, yes, merely pointing out that this violation in privacy, while bad, is not a reason for people to lose their heads is exactly the same as supporting a regime that is so bad that they have guards at the borders keeping people in!
I love how, in your mind, there is no distinction between "they watch the general flow of data", and "policemen going around arresting you if you do not praise the great leader enough."
Also, I would like to suggest a little... experiment for you. I'd like you to try to go, say, a week without using your cellphone (the company that gives you the phone service logs your calls), home phone (same reason), any email service (the companies that run them can, if they particularly feel like it, extract your list of contacts from their records), or any other miscellaneous communication device that contains any degree of computing power.
On top of that, I would like you to find anything on the internet without a search engine. I mean, get a new computer, without any search or browsing history, and try to find websites. Do it without referencing another computer.
Don't watch TV either; the companies that give you that service aggregate your watching habits.
Oh, and avoid health care, insurance, paying your taxes, people taking pictures of you, being in public (because I personally know people who take random candid pictures of people in crowds and share it as art), using the post office...
Such a choice is not really a choice, is it? Especially if you want to be a productive member of society; now, I might be exaggerating a bit, but you get the general idea.
Think of it less as me "defending" it, and more of me pointing out "this is the price for living in the modern world."
Also? Politicians are snakes. It isn't because they are intrinsically evil people, it's because they have a human (i.e., horrifically limited) view of the problems at hand, aren't much more knowledgeable on the topics they are working towards then the general populace, and are in a corrupt organization.
A representational democracy can only function properly if you have an educated voting populace who is capable of making educated decisions concerning the big problems, so they can tell their representative that "we want this, because it will be the best for the whole."
Instead, representative democracy as practiced is more about who has the best hair on TV. I've always been fond of saying that the US goes to war with itself every 4 years.
Also, fun fact about the government: the fact that every part of it blocks every other part from getting shit done is a saving grace which makes them less of a threat to your privacy than private companies.
The NSA wants to use the data they collected? Well, to pass it over to the FBI, they have to go through a given bureaucratic process. Once that is done, the FBI has to go through its own byzantine processes before they can make a decision, which might require checking with another agency, which has to go through their own review process...
That company? They have a meeting or two. Or, they assign a guy to go through your data.
And, really, why do you worry about your phone conversations, when you already give the government all of your financial/demographic information in the form of taxes?
Why do you draw a moral line at one, and not at the other?
What makes one set of information "OK", and the other "HOLY SHIT, THEY ARE VIOLATING MY PRIVACY!"?
@Raineh: Heh. I take it you have never lived in a bureaucracy. I lived in one for 8 years. They get nothing done. Look up at my note on the NSA, and multiply that by "hmm... you didn't sign in triplicate. Do it again."