Mass Surveillance

[Fwiss 29]

Well, I'm a bit late in posting this, but I want to see what you guys think about the massive surveillance by many major world powers (most prominently the United States, but also Canada, the UK, and Sweden). Surprisingly, much of the surveillance exposed by the leaks which started in June was already accepted as a given by the Internet community. For example, it has been well-known that an infrastructure has been in place for the United States' National Security Agency to wiretap all traffic which goes through United States Internet Service Providers, (which in my opinion is more serious than the recent revelations). We now know, however, that all phone metadata is being taken indiscriminately and for an unlimited time by the U.S, and that the NSA had the ability to obtain information from inside services such as Google, Facebook, Hotmail, and Skype, bypassing many encryption methods we hoped would protect from the earlier ISP-level wiretaps.

I was wondering what you guys thought of all this. Is it right for these governments to violate the human right to privacy for the sake of stopping whatever it is they are fighting at the time?