I can't believe this got down-voted. This is absolutely true. To the extent that Americans have a problem with what the NSA is doing, it's with the fact that NSA's collection of phone records doesn't try hard enough to filter out information from Americans. Their opposition to this does not mean they embrace the leftist/globalist ideas that are so common on HN (e.g. foreigners should have the same rights as Americans!)
If the reform is actually just:
1) We stop spying on prominent politicians in heavily allied countries; and
2) We shut down the mass collection of call records and implement a new system that only does mass collection of international calls and traffic;
That would make the vast majority of people perfectly happy.
I think you overestimate the requirements of most Americans.
Most of them just want to hear "I will fix this" and "we won't spy on YOU". Many could care less if you spy on the other guys, let alone other world leaders.
I'm not talking about the people who really don't care, I'm talking about the (broad) subset of Americans that care about the issue and oppose the NSA's current activities. My point is even within that group, the meat of the opposition is to those specific issues, not the fundamental mission of the NSA.
The gp certainly deserved downvoting. It was more or less Nixonian "silent majority" propaganda with no substance behind it.
In any given scandal that's not of truly titanic proportions, "addressing the concerns of the majority of people" inherently is papering-over any problems without addressing them - since the majority is going to be concerned with other stuff and no have that much of an opinion.
And your claims of the reactionary-ness of the majority hasn't been born-out by polls. The majority may indeed be satisfiable by simple thing but the rhetoric of that is not so much democratic as demagogic.
If the reform is actually just:
1) We stop spying on prominent politicians in heavily allied countries; and
2) We shut down the mass collection of call records and implement a new system that only does mass collection of international calls and traffic;
That would make the vast majority of people perfectly happy.