The US does not have equal protection under the law, and the laws are enforced arbitrarily to carry out the will of the military and the ownership class.
The thing you reference is just a cover story. It's plain as day to anyone paying attention who runs that country.
There is no party you can vote for that will stop the perpetual war or perpetual ubiquitous surveillance, despite a vast majority of people in the country being against both war and surveillance.
> A majority of voters say they are satisfied with the authority given to U.S. intelligence agencies to monitor Americans suspected of committing a crime, according to a poll released Thursday.
> Fifty-one percent of respondents in a recent Hill-HarrisX survey said the intelligence community has the "right amount of power" in determining who should be subject to government surveillance.
1) Despite Snowden, most Americans are not aware of the extent of the surveillance to which they are subjected.
2) Your first quoted paragraph mentions "suspected of committing a crime". This suggests to me that they were asked about targeted surveillance, that is, of criminal suspects. The issue is one of mass surveillance: the surveillance conducted of those who are not suspected of criminal activity.
Most people aren't okay with that, when informed of the full scope of that to which they are subjected.
Snowden himself is not particularly popular these days. If there isn't an outright majority who view him as a traitor, then it's certainly a sizeable minority. Opinions were almost evenly split back in 2013, and opinions on pardoning vs. prosecution were likewise evenly split when this was polled in 2017 (about 30% each, however). And over the past couple of years, the intelligence community appears to have convinced many more people that Snowden is a Russian asset - I suspect American attitudes towards him have cooled somewhat, or perhaps become partisan.
If you look at polling on concerns about surveillance in general in 2015, it was pretty much an even split, with a slight majority who were concerned about surveillance.[0] A majority did say it was unacceptable to surveil American citizens, at 57%, with 40% saying it was acceptable - I would not call that a vast majority, though.
Even if somebody says they're against this sort of mass surveillance, that does not change anything unless people vote based on it. Like it or not, things like surveillance and war take a back seat to all the other issues voters care about, especially since those two are among the least likely to actually affect the individual voters in question. The result of this is that few Democrats are going to vote for Rand Paul or Ted Cruz just because they happen to position themselves against the NSA or war in Syria, and few Republicans are going to vote for Bernie Sanders based on the same, even if they have strong preferences against surveillance and war - and that's ignoring the fact that there are definitely people on the other side of these issues, who believe that pardoning Snowden and withdrawing from Afghanistan is bowing down to Russia or something.
Ultimately, people get the government they deserve.
Sure, but life continues in the absence of democracy, and encryption is useful in the short term in that life. Building a democracy where none exists is a multigenerational task.
