Aaron Blake in the Washington Post makes a convincing argument that the revelations are “turning point in the political debate over surveillance”:

The big question from here is whether these violations will be written off as minor mistakes in a vast and vital national security apparatus or as the smoking gun for an apparatus that routinely goes too far.

If you had asked us last week whether the Christies of the world or the Pauls of the world had the upper hand in this debate, we would have said the Christies.

This Friday morning, it’s a whole lot less clear that that’s the case.

The problem, I think, is that the next step forward isn’t a clear for those who believe in privacy – it feels much like the machine is far too big to stop easily, and I don’t think mainstream society really has done a lot of thinking about how much privacy we should allow. This isn’t to say there aren’t people who have done a lot of great writing/thinking around privacy – the problem is that thinking has developed into any social norms about what kind of privacy we demand from our government. This is why the first policy reaction to the revelation, the Amash Amendment, was to shut it completely, because we didn’t realize how we had really let it get, so we pulled back sharply.

Any specifics for policy-making to slow down (or reverse) the growth of the surveillance state will likely take a while as we hammer exactly how much privacy we want versus how much spying will allow. Hopefully now, at least, the conversation will be out in the open.