"I'm not sure which is worse: the NSA surveillance programs themselves..."

"... or the fact that the leaks about them have caused normally reasonable people to publicly commit themselves to so many strange notions in a desperate attempt to defend the Obama administration, e.g. 'The whole concept of privacy is obsolete,' 'Gathering data about phone calls doesn't raise serious privacy concerns,' 'Surveillance is unobjectionable if it's been going on for many years,' 'We don't have to worry about the 4th Amendment as long as a judge is willing to rubber-stamp the government's actions without any adversarial process,' etc."