The for-profit corporate-owned Surveillance State is well-entrenched by now. The process to get us here took decades, but it went on hyper-drive after September 11, 2001--by design.
The for-profit corporations and most of the government establishment (of both parties) have already come to an understanding about how the Surveillance Police State is going to operate.
Fusion centers, joint operating forces (police, intelligence, military, first-responders, private corporations) are all part of this relatively new (but well-entrenched system), and they are now rapidly deploying both, the technological and legal infrastructure to cement its control over the population.
Democracy has ceased to exist; the U.S. Constitution has been subverted/suspended and rendered quaint. The rule of law is no longer, except as to the understanding that there exist a two-tiered justice system: one increasingly onerous, brutal, and oppressive for the general population, and one forgiving, lenient, and non-punishing for the ruling-elite.
That is why is so disheartening to see people spending huge amounts of time and effort on addressing the rapid-fire revelations about the true nature of the system, as if we were still operating within the context of a constitutional and representative democracy.
The dialogue, the effort, the activism should be focused on dealing with the reality at hand. As long as we continue operating in a fantastical and alternative reality, we will never be able to catch up with the actual reality of the situation.
And this is beyond party politics, and even Obama, or anybody else. It's too late for any single individual in government to be able to do anything about it; if they did tried (really tried), they would put themselves in danger.
All this fascistic infrastructure, all the databases, the surveillance, the institutional connections between government organization and for-profit corporatist cartels, was already in place by the time Obama became president. In its entirety, it is more powerful than the president himself.
The huge data collection centers with exponentially-increasing capability to collect data about each citizen and build very detailed dossiers will continue to be built unmolested... Any discussion you may be witnessing in Congress about the NSA Surveillance issue is a joke, a subterfuge, Kabuki theater to fool people into thinking that the issue is being addressed.
Why is it so hard for people to realize this?