It might be that the person you are responding to is making an effort to enforce a social more against defending spying that is clearly out of control. In which case the necessity of nastiness should be clear.

That said, we know that the US government has carried out propaganda operations "on the homefront" to normalize and legitimize illegal and unconstitutional behavior. And it's pretty obvious when an army of blog commenters and twitter handles are all pushing the same talking points at the same time and don't seem to be active outside of business hours on the east coast...