I personally think the US has a tradition of liberty, in the Constitution and stretching back to Habeas Corpus, that is worth protecting, and shouldn't be using any sort of mass-surveillance of private interactions. Warrantless mass surveillance is the kind of law enforcement strategy used by authoritarian states like China's.
The reason the power of the state ought to be checked is that the people who work in the state can pose a threat to others, just as anyone can. A threat analysis that does not include the state itself as a potential threat vector, and only considers the threats that emerge when the state cannot invade everyone and anyone's privacy at its whim, is wholly incomplete.
I'd like to think the US has a tradition of liberty as well. But I /know/ the US has a tradition of operating as the world's de-facto global enforcer, especially post WWII. The ship of mass-surveillance has sailed. Does that mean I think we should throw up our hands and accept it? No. As I assume you'd agree with, I think it's wrong, and I want to see it eventually unwound.
With that said, I'm suspicious of litigating the sin of the ship having left the port. I'm more curious to see where the ship has set sail too. Fundamentally, the US dollar has the power it has because it is backed by the US military. And the US military has the power it has because it established America's pole position as global superpower.
So if you're going to talk about unwinding a regime of mass-surveillance, I'd like to think you're also going to talk about how, practically speaking, America moves back into an isolationist geopolitical doctrine not seen since pre WWI at latest. I'll be honest, I really wouldn't mind seeing that. But I also don't really see it happening, because it requires America to cede its global superpower status and return to existence as a mere regional power.
Now, you've said a lot of things about how things "should" be, but you haven't really talked about practically "how" they've come to be the way they are, or how we may get them to be another way. So I'll ask you directly: just how do you propose we get this country enriched by and enmeshed in war to this grand higher existence you envision?
We dont have economic dominance because we have a strong military.
We can afford a strong military because we had economic dominance.
This economic dominance was predicated in strong freedom of association principles , and a policy of neutrality that kept us largely out of expensive disputes early in the republic.
This is how things have really come to be. I will tell directly you reality refutes your adventurism: the roman state collapsed despite having the strongest military in the world.
That state collapsed not because of army defeats, but because of a hollow economic core caused by permanent deficits.
This is where the US today. And pushing more freedom to associate to illegal status is just piling on the US to italy-style irrelevance
Collapse is a strong word, my friend. While we're on the subject of "adventurism" perhaps we ought to consider what you've proposed. I think the word you are looking when you say "collapse" is "decline" -- the Byzantine empire lasted for a millennium and a half, hardly a collapse, no? And I think the concepts you are looking for when you say "strong freedom of association principles" are "colonization" and "manifest destiny."
We can talk about freedom of association until we are blue in the face, and there is nothing wrong with the principle itself -- in fact, as you point out, it remains the brightest part of what enables American prosperity and something that is a lot closer to true egalitarian existence than many other versions of civilization in history. While I can agree with you about that, the fact remains that the frontier spirit was enabled not just by simple expansion of an enterprising band of pioneers into a virgin unspoiled terrain, but rather the forceful pushing out and often wholesale eradication (and trails of tears) of a people who were already present.
For all of our sake, I wish that history was more wholly in accord with your very "enlightened" idea of iconoclastic individualism. Sadly, whether you like it or not, the history of at least the past ten millennia of human civilization has been largely built on the back of war, property and empire -- including the Roman empire you cite as an example. I don't know if it does your argument any favors to torture the truth through deliberate omission to serve the way you wish the world worked. You might run the risk of getting "everything backwards" to borrow your feisty phrase.
