The flip side of the coin is a voting public who refuse to accept terrorism as part of life. Demanding that politicians do something when a terrorist act happens, and blaming them for not stopping it.

Here in Australia we've been ridiculously safe from terrorism. If we get a serious terrorist event, people here are going to lose their marbles, rather than accept that 'one got through' the net. You see a similar thing in the US, where the public quite happily throw hundreds of thousands of US soldiers at muslim countries, but then complain that they die, and that they aren't supplied with enough armour and equipment. There's a very weird disconnect going on there. In general, the voting public want this surveillance, to protect them from the 'bad guys'.

The flip side of that flip side is that people in "our" camp (against ubiquitous surveillance, believing terrorism isn't the biggest threat, accepting "one got through," etc.) seem to have great difficulty accepting that the public largely disagrees with them.

Look at the discussion over NSA dragnet surveillance. It's almost always discussed in terms of an abuse of power against an unsuspecting public. Politicians set it up to further their own ends, or the NSA itself is grabbing power by blackmailing politicians, or at least implicitly threatening blackmail if anybody gets out of line.

The reality as far as I can see it is much more mundane. Things like NSA dragnet surveillance are happening because it's what the people want. Terrorism is seen as a threat that justifies almost anything required to counter it. The politicians are just giving their electorate what it wants.

If we want to fight this stuff, we need to win the war of public opinion. Unless the plan is to subvert the government ourselves and institute some sort of enlightened dictatorship, the only way to get this stuff to change is to convince people that our position is actually better, because most of them don't think that right now.