Those powers being to use the military inside his own borders, being allowed to kill citizens of his own country without judicial oversight and waging wars by his own decision.

And these powers derive from the 9/11 trauma, not from mass surveillance. And we've seen far worse in the US in the last 60 years.

I certainly agree that surveillance enables bad governments, but I've yet to see a good argument that surveillance causes good governments to go bad (eg UK vs France).

The director of intelligence can keep his job despite the criminal act of lying under oath to congress. In what we call in Europe a democratic state something like that doesn't happen.

Alas, that does happen, and has happened, regularly over the last years, decades, and centuries.

Don't forget that research doesn't happen in a vacuum. Part of the danger of poweful surveillance is that those organisations have power that they can use to dissuade such research.

If I find anything like that happening, you'll all be the first to know!