Treason

For another, the legal opinions on the application of the laws that made the programs "legal" are themselves secret. Passing a law and then assuming that the law would function as intended are two different things - many laws result in unforseen consequences, including overreaching by an agency taking the law farther than Congress had intended. Normally, it would be easy for Congress to revisit the issue. But when the legal opinions defining the Executive branch's interpretation of the law are themselves secret...well, it's rather difficult for Congress to know that there is a problem.

Obama keeps going back to the point that "checks and balances were in place." The point is that those checks and balances utterly failed.

In short, if I were to attempt a description of the Legislative branch of the United States government in but a single word, I would have to go with "incompetent."

Again - the issue here is not the violation of the law. Rather, it is the careful and partially (though not wholly) secret methodical circumvention of Constitutional rights (at least as the public has tended to interpret those rights such as the Right to Privacy and Free Speech) through the passing of new laws that are, by design, virtually impossible to challenge in court.

Sorry no. The Director of National Intelligence lied to Congress about NSA surveillance. Mr. Goebbels, err, Mr. Clapper:

An electorate devoid of better choices and faced with hopelessly gerrymandered districts such that the two "real" parties are virtually invulnerable to any upstart alternative party.

The American political machine has created an extremely effective system of self-preservation. You know this. Virtually everyone knows this, unless he or she is an utter fool. Representatives who are not Republicans or Democrats are exceptionally rare and weild effectively zero power. While the Republicans and the Democrats hold different views on such topics as "abortion" and other emotional hot-buttons to maintain the facade of "choice," on a great many important issues they completely agree. For instance, on the NSA - rare is the Democrat or the Republican politician who is actually willing to undo legislation like the USA PATRIOT Act. Most politicians from both parties refer to "whistleblowers" immediately as "traitors."

In order to sue the NSA and challenge their warrantless collection of information or indeed any other single policy, I must first prove that I have "standing" to challenge those policies. To prove I have "Standing," I must show that I have been personally affected - for instance, I must show that I, personally, have been surveiled by the NSA.

It would appear that you are oversimplifying the issues at hand in order to blame the electorate for the abuses of their elected leaders. But you and I and anyone else who is not a complete fool knows that much-vaunted democracy bears many flaws, of which these latest scandals are merely a single example.

That's what you took away from the tea party?

It's far more complicated than that. Districts have been gerrymandered with the specific intent of maintaining current party distributions among voters. Many of the districts, if you look at them on a map, make literally no sense outside of that context.

Because since all of the evidence is secret, I cannot show that I have actually suffered the deprivation of due process.

Knowledge of a general and uncertain possibility is very different from specific knowledge of an ongoing certainty. This is simple human nature - some of us have been upset about the USA PATRIOT act and other laws for a while - but sometimes it takes a revelation of specifics with evidence from someone like Snowden to actually catapult the issue into the national consciousness and spark mass outrage.

You're focusing on the trees. Look at the forest - nothing significantly changed.

It requires voter awareness, for one thing. One of the largest flaws of democracy is that it requires an informed electorate - if you asked 9/10ths of Americans on the street whether their district has been gerrymandered, they'd answer with variations of "what's gerrymandering?"And you're still relying on a simplified version of the voting process. You cannot vote for a candidate based on their position on redistricting alone - you vote on a large number of positions, and redistricting is very rarely one of the hot-button voting issues. That's not even wrong, it's an inevitable consequence of voting for people rather than specific positions. It's a package deal. Find me a "perfect" candidate and I assure you I'll vote for him/her. But I can honestly say that not once can I recall a state legislator that I could choose to vote for who even mentioned redistricting in his/her campaign.

That's a nice thaught, but it has never passed the muster of a judge. I can remember not terribly long ago a lawsuit that attempted to challenge the FBI's usage of National Security Letters (authorized under the USA PATRIOT Act, these require information to be disclosed and forbids the recipient from disclosing receipt or content of the letter). The system was known, but the complainant could not prove to a judge that an NSL had actually been used against him - and so he could not prove he had standing, and the case was thrown out.An unconstitutional system is not sufficient to sue. You have to prove that you, specifically, have been targeted by that system. Not that you may have been, or that your rights would be violated if you were a target. You have to prove that you've actually been targeted. That's impossible if the evidence you would need is classified.