You're still only talking about half the issue. If you won't confront the sordid history of the United States itself in surveilling its own citizens, you're ill-equipped to discuss what safeguards are appropriate for the United States. Referring to other countries can be valuable also, but if you can't at least cover the key events in the country in question, I don't see how it's possible to have a balanced discussion.

Again, I'm not arguing whether it's possible to use digital surveillance and digital forensics to solve and/or prevent crime. Of course you can. The question then is about how to prevent abuses, but you keep not addressing the historical large-scale abuses, and the small-scale ones you don't seem to even view as abuses (?!).