According to businessinsider.com the: "… U.S. intelligence community is vast, composed of 17 distinct organizations each operating under its own shroud of secrecy". Additionally, businessinsider.com estimates that the classified budgets of these intelligence agencies may be as of a 2012 estimate: "… pegs the cost at about $75 billion…" which is an astonishing monetary figure. While, in theory, these various spying agencies are accountable to someone or somebody or some government oversight committee, and in theory, operate strictly in accordance with United States Constitutional law, the truth lies far outside these boundaries. While we can take some solace in great organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, whistleblowers, certain citizens, certain blogs, and various media outlets, as well as the Freedom of Information Act, for the most part the general public, the citizenry of this United States, is basically left in the dark in regards to domestic spying which is either unwittingly or deliberately performed against them.
Because of technology, there has never been a better time to be a spy, and the government thereby has very little interest in walking away from all its capabilities of learning just about everything of actionable value against any citizen or groups of citizens as it pretty much desires. If would be one thing, if the government had the best interests of its citizens in mind, when it performs its domestic spying, but in actuality, primarily, the government tries to place itself into a position to which they can argue, somewhat successfully, that all this data, all this intrusion, is necessitated by their concern for the welfare of the country as well as its citizens. Francis Bacon said long ago that: "knowledge is power," and this government absolutely knows that this is true.
When the government essentially knows everything about you in the sense of where, why, and how, then they own you, lock, stock, and smoking barrel. When you play a game of cards and you cannot read or see your opponent's cards yet they can read and see yours, preferably without you knowing it, you cannot hope to win. That is the situation that our citizens are in, in which, they are effectively having their Fourth Amendment rights to be secure violated in that we read: "… in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…" Today's government relishes the fact that their extensive intrusion electronic devices in conjunction with their massive databases allows them to search, to correlate, to analyze, to track, and to document just about everything that has an electronic footprint for their own purposes.
The legitimate government of this country is meant to be for the people and by the people, but this has been subverted over time to simply mean, that the government knows best and woe unto he that should question this wisdom. There was a time, when J. Edgar Hoover, was perhaps the most feared man in the USA, because of his position as the director of the FBI, a post which he held through Democratic as well as Republican administrations, for nearly fifty years. Hoover was legitimately feared because he had information, lots of it, so we can only imagine what Hoover would give to be alive today with all this advanced technology at his disposal, but unfortunately for us Director Hoover is dead, yet the legacy of Hoover lives on today in the specter of all our government spying agencies, which are far more menacing, far more diabolical, far more destructive, and far, far, far, beyond the pale.