The chances that my seatbelt kills me are probably higher than me dying or being harmed by mass surveillance. And I'm married to an Afghan.

Then again I'd probably guess that my seat-belt is significantly more effective at saving my life.

Plus most of the ability for abuse exists even without a system in place. If the government wants to discredit me they can make up evidence and get a warrant. Or they can just do warrantless wiretapping.

The ability to spy on all citizens exist whether it's used or not. That goes triple for metadata that companies keep anyway. As long as Google is spying, that information is ripe for being taken by government.

There is still a risk that a non-rouge part of government could use mass surveillance for shitty purposes. Like hunting down jews, homosexuals, civil rights activists, etc. But the whole government would have to break bad. And they could reinstate a mass surveillance apparatus in a couple months anyway.

I'm not really convinced that using the NSA to spy on suspected terrorists, spies, and drug cartels is really an significant risk to our freedom and safety in general.

We would have expected no large scale terrorist attacks in the US from 2001 until now? Absolutely no one expected that.

Is it a black swan event if it was attempted 8 years earlier (WTC 1993, 6 dead, 1000 injured)?

I think the biggest actual capture is buffering. I suspect the NSA is buffering almost all communication in the USA (or maybe just international cable communications, but I'd bet all). But it's not actively used or analyzed unless something comes up. And after a few days it's deleted. If you end up shooting up a Eagles of Death Metal show in Paris, they can rewind your recent communications.

Whether that is mass surveillance is pretty questionable IMO. It's a sort of a "if a tree falls in the wood and nobody hears, does it make a sound" territory. It's really no different than the Post Office having your mail. They could rip it open, but their mere possession isn't surveillance.

I think where you have a better argument is the meta data mass collection. They physically got that information. It's on their servers forever. And here is where the surveillance part comes in--they actually run analysis on it. They claim they only stay within "two hops" of known suspects, but that's probably BS and you get into a "6 degree of Keven Bacon" situation where two hops probably gets nearly everyone.

So I think that meta data program is the only program I've heard about from the Snowden leaks that is actually a mass surveillance of the American people.

But there is a counter argument. It's mass surveillance of information that isn't actually private, thus, it's not a intrusion of your privacy. They are only looking at data that your telephone company has on you. In fact, baring any sort of data privacy law, that information is Verizon's and they can do what they want with it. Including hand it over to the government.

And in practice, American companies keep that sort of meta data and use it for commercial purposes all the time. Hell, google doesn't even have to triangulate towers, they just use the GPS the customer paid for to track them to within 10 feet.

PRISM isn't supposed to be used against US citizens in that manner. They've admitted that PRISM can be used in that manner, but that's never been a goal of the program and theoretically what little oversight there is is supposed to prevent that.

PRISM isn't a mass surveillance program.

A third possibility is that such queries are detected, but maintaining secrecy is judged to be a higher priority than preventing a comparatively smaller number of deaths while revealing their capabilities.