> Perhaps it's just too exhausting to consider the extent of corruption in the USA.

Abolish the (secret) police?

It's basically the same debate; people need to feel that the threat from the "protectors" is greater than the threat they are allegedly protecting against before something gets done. And, realistically, being spied on by the CIA is fairly low down the average person's list of problems. Even the citizens who are most directly threatened by American policing would prefer dealing with the immediate threat of street violence and gunshot murders by the police than the distant, nebulous threat of the CIA plane over the protests.

Having your candidate spied on by the CIA, FSB, Met police, or Jim-Bob's Laptop Repair Shop is more of a problem.

While the threat (expressed as P(harm)*harm) from XYAgency surveillance is low or medium, the unmitigated threat from the things their surveillance practices protect against - namely, terrorism - is also low. The mitigation effect is lower still.

Objectively, even in 2001 terrorism was a negligible risk compared to everyday risks, and subjectively, there hasn't been a major terrorist attack for years. The only reason mass surveillance exists is a rationale by the US state that "more power is good". This may apply to the US army, but not to the spies.

Also, like you say, once the american spies start to (pun intended) "Interfere in american elections", then the problem affects everybody with P=1. Personally I could live with it trump were the only candidate they work against, but if they do it to trump, they likely do it to others. (I see no evidence of interference or other abuse of collected data currently, but I think it's dangerous to give them the power to collect all this info that can in principle be abused for selective prosecution and/or blackmail).

Also, it affects not just politicians, but also corporate execs, who can be further pressured using the other means of the state, and who themselves have power the state can deputize.

A democracy should have the surveillance powers that are proportionate to the benefit from these powers and no more. There is a positive value in minimizing state surveillance power; this concept seems lost on america. (In fairness, it seems lost on conservative parties worldwide.)

Anti-terrorism activities are nice to talk about in public for PR purposes, but the actual purpose of these agencies, and the reason why they are essential, is to combat the intelligence agencies of near-peer adversaries. Most significantly these days, to disrupt the attempts by those agencies to influence government policy and to hold a commanding position to deploy cyberattacks from in the event of conventional war.

I think it's clear that they are out of control, from the examples you list among others. The harder argument is that they're not doing it in our best interest. Without good visibility into their activities (which could very well inhibit those activities), it's hard to tell which of their activities are a net benefit to our country.

My guess is that most Americans would expect that they sometimes do things that aren't legal, but that generally they are at least intending to do it with the best interest of our country in mind. That second part is the primary reason why they aren't being wholesale shut down, and why they're able to get away with things like lying to congress.

> The harder argument is that they're not doing it in our best interest.

I disagree. I think they absolutely believe they are doing what is best for the country, but without actual accountability and meaningful outside oversight and input, I would say it is far more likely they have become myopically focused. That they are unable to accurately judge or weigh the effects of persistent surveillance against one’s own citizens and how that negatively impacts a free and open democracy and a government that feels accountable to its citizens, vs their own very skewed perspective of looking at nothing but “threats” and thinking about nothing but threats, and planning for nothing but threats. The “everything is a nail to a hammer” saying comes to mind.

> That second part is the primary reason why they aren't being wholesale shut down

Two thoughts:

1) Even if most Americans decided they needed to be shut down, how would we enact that? It seems to me there are very few people who have that power, and even if a great majority of us wanted it, we have no way to enact it (and no way of knowing if it was actually enacted; we could be told it had been done, but that could easily be an inscrutable lie)

2) If they were actually shut down, what would the people who worked there do? Highly intelligent, skilled, with low morals, used to performing nefarious activities; they would go on to be in shadow NGOs, organized crime, reform under other names, etc.

> If they were actually shut down, what would the people who worked there do?

Prison time, like any other criminal enterprise.

This is kind of ridiculous. These are high level conflicts between equally valid government entities about how they should operate as well as nebulous questions on how constitutional law applies. I would assume there are legal memos, signed authorizations, etc. for what is going on. We could argue that secret authorizations for these kinds of things shouldn’t exist, but the fact is they do. If the president authorizes something, and years later, a court decides this action was unconstitutional, the employees are not criminally responsible. This isn’t a Nuremburg trial situation where crimes against humanity are committed under the guise of “just following orders”. This is a case of following orders because the best legal experts cannot 100% agree on constructional law and how it applies to different circumstances and different powers given to the various branches of government.

The straightforward way to eliminate the ambiguity is to submit the programs to democratic oversight, including by The People. But instead they've worked hard to do the exact opposite, going so far as to blatantly lie to congress. This points to a criminal conspiracy, regardless of how many employees are working to craft dubious legal justifications. Usually criminals don't get to just say "my bad" and walk away after being caught, and I don't see why higher crimes should carry less punishment.

These are intelligence agencies. Being secretive about what they do is largely the point. Some degree of oversight is of course required to ensure that the organizations haven’t been subverted and are still on-mission, but the responsibilities of an intelligence agency are too fragile and too essential to be subjected to political meddling.

"Blindly trust us, or bad things will happen" has no place in a Free society - especially after they've been repeatedly caught abusing that trust. There are many steps NSA could take to increase their transparency without exposing the details of operations, but as I said the problem is that they actively oppose oversight. This is likely due to the usual authoritarian delusion ("taking more power will help accomplish our benevolent goal"), which is at odds with democracy.