I'm far more concerned by the/my impression that the public seems to have accepted total surveillance as "the new normal". It seems like Snowden's work has resulted in the vetting of mass surveillance.
I really hope I'm wrong.
I mean, we now know that online forums are subverted and socially engineered to keep 'bad opinions' down.
Add to that the still persisting mass media with known effects - and I slowly start to think of the internet as being very much part of the 'mass media', too.
For example, I noticed a lot of articles in newspapers being written by journalists that have agendas that diverge completely from the opinions of the people commenting on an article. The next step, I'd guess, is to 'properly' police these comments....
Free-market-oriented economists since Milton Friedman have strongly criticized the efficiency of democracy. They base this on the argument that voters are irrational, among other things. Their criticism towards democracy is that voters are highly uninformed about many political issues, especially relating to economics, and have a strong bias about the few issues on which they are fairly knowledgeable.
No more is this point evidenced than on news forums regarding current events. There is every possibility that the journalists diverge from the masses because the masses are incorrect.
If I had a $ for every forum commenter that talked about the oil in Afghanistan I would be richer than Peter Thiel.
Have a read of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_democracy and just consider whether in some circumstances the consensus opinion may be the wrong one.
A lot of this is also a political / legal question; has the public ever been deeply interested in privacy questions? My (naive?) guess is no, but the judicial branch has historically done an okay job of representing the public interest, and giant scandals (like Nixon) have moved legislators.