The thesis is simplistic though, and can be distilled along pretty obvious classic political theory: every society has to balance liberty against order, and decide how to deploy power to defend its borders. It's the essential question in classic political philosophy from The Republic to Machiavelli and everything that came after.
It's not enough to simply repeat the ancient truism that "power and fear are dangerous," which should be axiomatic by now, particularly coming from a German point of view, which has spent the last half-century-plus contemplating that exact question, from the point of view of having quite dramatically been both oppressed and oppressor in that time frame.
The broad question that needs to become visible and widely discussed in American politics right now is both classic and novel, and quite frankly we need help in guiding this discussion:
The classic question that needs to be resurfaced is, how does the US become self-conscious and more transparent about the specific boundaries we draw between protecting order and establishing liberty?
The novel question in the new post-9/11 context is how to manage that same balance in the ongoing battle for intelligence which by definition requires tremendous secrecy and daring.
It's clear that many both in and outside the US are profoundly uncomfortable with the current state of NSA surveillance and I agree. But what is an appropriate level of surveillance? How can US citizens take back control of that conversation and make deliberate decisions about that kind of society we want to be?
And that's really the underlying problem that I think the Speigel article was simplistically, indirectly getting at: citizens in the US no longer have the democratic power to make those decisions. But in order for the governing powers to trust democratic processes to make those policies, we need to become self-aware and articulate enough to advocate those policies, and bring up leaders that energize and focus that discussion with real statesmanship.
Statesmanship! Where is it? Can it exist in the current broken and polarized political environment?
To the degree that we still have some democratic processes in place we are responsible to say more than just, "Snowden is right!" We have to know what kind of society we actually want to be in this new context.
The enemies and threats are new, but the questions are ancient. We have not yet adapted old answers to the new context. And for that we need not only novel political theoretical solutions, but the strong statesmanship to apply them.