How the NSA could stop sucking and be awesome instead

What is it that makes US citizens so gung ho on spying on other countries but get all upset when they are being spied on?

Why should it be ok to have warrant-less surveillance of all the people in Spain (for example) but Texas is right out?

By seeing the rest of the world as the enemy and by not respecting the rights (as enshrined in the privacy directives of the various nations) of every citizen of every other country on the planet the US is placing itself in a position where sooner or later the rest of the world will start to see it as the enemy.

Maybe that's the goal, I don't know anything about what goes on behind the scenes other than what's leaked but I think this is a very bad development that could backfire.

America is fast losing its benevolent and 'on our side' image. It may not be all too visible from the other side of the world but people elsewhere are shifting their stance in relatively large numbers and that's as far as I can see uniformly negative.

The NSA could stop sucking and be awesome if they not only stuck to their charter of providing intelligence on 'persons of interest' but did that in the narrowest way possible and only after they obtained specific warrants.

Remember the ruckus over that spy plane downed in China?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainan_Island_incident

What do you think would be the US response if the Chinese, the Russians or even some Latin American state would fly spy planes right off the coast of Washington, New York or LA?

This goes way beyond the NSA, an article along the line of 'How the USA could stop sucking and be awesome instead' would be a much needed refresher. After 9/11 the US had immense political capital and most if not all of that has been spent by now and the general worldview of the US has slipped from 'friendly' to 'possibly hostile'.

Writing this isn't going to change anything, I realize that. But I really wished we could get out of the 'us and them' phase.

This is very constructive. I think this post could be expanded a bit when it comes to key signing and basically ELI5 the concept to make it crystalline why this would be useful and why it would still be private. (It gets the point across, to be sure, but it could be more accessible to less knowledgable folks by being more explicit in marching out its explanation.)