On the scale of things to worry about, most Americans are more worried about the flesh and blood swat team down the street serving search warrants than internet surveillance. When the police are armed with military grade weapons and sees the community it's policing as the enemy, people are getting more hesitant to get the police involved in even seemingly minor things. This is where the 2nd amendment comes in to play. If the police can't protect you, you have to protect yourself.

The guardian article was right about one thing: America is in the middle of a civil war of sorts.

The NSA does what they do in secret, without consultation or permission from the governed (if you believe the foot dragging and outright lying to Congress, which I do). We don't trust the NSA, because they never asked us for our trust except by the very thinnest stretch of implication.

The 2nd Amendment however is part of a public document. The public document in the US. And many people believe in the 2nd, either because it allows them guns, or because more generally it's part of our governing document. Of course many people don't support the 2nd. But it is the law, and because it's explicitly part of the Constitution there are huge (but not impossible) barriers to changing it.

As for apathy, yes we in the US are apathetic, but it doesn't imply that we trust the NSA, it just means that we're generally apathetic. The list of issues and wrongs that we in the US ignore is long (just for starters, compare our war deaths and gun violence deaths to the deaths of innocents around the world by "collateral damage"), and the NSA is just one of many. We mostly don't give a shit about anything except hating the opposite political party, hating people who have different religious views than our own, and watching TV. And football, we like that a lot.