This government, in conjunction with its many obedient media outlets has been able to convince a significant amount of Americans that if you aren't actively engaged in criminal or suspect type activity, that you need not worry about the government unduly interfering with you. In fact, the willingness of the public to accept any and everything that the government needs from that public in regards to pat downs, email surveillance, GPS surveillance, the recording of private conversations, and so on, would seem to indicate that a lot of Americans are only too willing to sacrifice their freedom, for safety; and even more to point, feel that all good Americans should be willing to do the exact same thing.
The problem with this type of blind faith thinking, is that, certain people believe that because they are pretty much never engaged in any unlawful activity, that they want all others that may be engaged in unlawful, suspicious, or unorthodox behavior, as determined by this government, to suffer for their choices, and willingly support the government's efforts in seeing that this is actually accomplished. While within a certain narrow minded perspective, it makes some common sense, that governments should protect their citizens by going after those that are perceived enemies of the state; the elephant in the room, is who exactly is watching our governmental overseers while they perform these actions on behalf of the people? In addition, when you cannot protest and dissent against your own government, then obviously, the people of that state, are not free, though they may be safe within the construct that the government has so erected.
So too, when the government has a detailed dossier about every single citizen, of which, they have absolute knowledge of everything that each citizen does on a given day, the depth of which, reaches down to the actual minutiae of each twenty four hour period of everyone; and further that they have the ability to correlate, analyze, and study all of this information, at their leisure and at their command, than that government has truly become a very fearful master of its people. Additionally, Hollywood alone, has taught us thoroughly that not everything that we see in this world is real, though it may perform the illusion of being real, so that, audio and video tapes can easily be edited and reconstructed; documents can be manipulated to change facts into non-facts and non-facts into facts, in which, the bottom line is that when all the information that the government has on a given citizen is accurate, than manipulating just a small part of that accuracy to show crime where there is no crime, or treacherous comments when there are no treacherous comments, or infidelity when there is fidelity, is a remarkably easy task.
This essentially means that all those that have nothing to hide and have obediently therefore given carte blanche to the government, don't seem to recognize, that when the bell so tolls for them or their loved ones, that they will have no one to defend them, nobody that will raise a hand, and no ability to protect themselves, because they have already sold themselves to the government at a very cheap price; never seeming to recognize that those that voluntarily trade their freedom for safety, have in reality, willingly put on the chains of their own imprisonment.