The election of Obama did facilitate a lot of change within NSA. It simply wasn't the type of change you all thought it would be, but it is an improvement in most respects compared to 2007's DoJ and DoD.
How so? At most he required they get explicit legislative authorization, which they did, rather than potentially being more easily struck down by the courts. Pretty much continued doing the same things as far as I can tell.
A significant paring down of the "watch lists" used by NSA (and TSA too, it seems), the revocation of the previous definition of 'torture', scrapping some of the surveillance programs of no useful intelligence value, stuff like that.
Certainly there is more that can be done, but I think if this whole affair is indicative of the reaction to be expected then I'm not surprised people avoided making oversight of these programs a loud and noisy public debate.
Ah. Those are things meaningful to those suffering directly but not to those designing security systems, which is what particularly concerns me.
I still think a Gingrich or Tea Party level congressional revolution in 2014, bipartisan, focused on "re-establishing effective oversight of the military/intelligence apparatus", should have reasonable odds of going through. There are enough districts which don't financially benefit from this (and a lot which are going to be hurt by it, like Silicon Valley and Redmond), that a number of junior congressmen could probably get elected on it (assuming they're not otherwise psycho).
