Surveillance on Americans by the NSA is still illegal. What we're upset about is that NSA has made it easier to abuse the law to perform surveillance of Americans by pre-caching Verizon phone record metadata and automating FISA compliance in a fashion that may actually be usable on arbitrary user IDs.

In other words they've made it easier to do all that surveillance if they choose to, but as far as I'm aware even Snowden has not claimed to see the NSA actually track an American down using the system, only that the NSA could do it easily.

While that is certainly a serious matter that warrants public debate, it's not the same as what you're referring to (which makes me wonder why... it's not like this issue requires any exaggeration).

The same goes for illegal extra-judicial killing of citizens... don't think too many figured that it would be resolved by simply publishing a DOJ argument explaining that it's perfectly legal.

If any good has come from either of the last two administrations it may simply be that more people on both sides of the popular political spectrum have become convinced that the government is not our friend.