It's disheartening that politicians can barely confirm whether they even know what is going on (i.e. what they vote for on our behalf), let alone the have the capacity to grasp the scale of the surveillance and its (eventual) misuse. It takes at least a modest understanding of math and computers to understand the gravity of such a dragnet, which is very discouraging to me. And when white house reps defend themselves with gems like, "informing people about false claims isn't necessarily what we do," is even less reassuring.
On that note, an interesting article on acm.org was recently posted about about how politics, and not encryption, is the only way to make it change. I think the reason why a lot of us invest so heavily in encryption solutions is because the above makes us so incredibly cynical that politics will achieve anything.