In a democracy, people don't get re-elected when they're shown to be crooks in such a huge way that it's impossible to ignore. We already know, to some extent,

In a democracy, people don't get re-elected when they're shown to be crooks in such a huge way that it's impossible to ignore. We already know, to some extent, how crook-y some of these people are. In particular, we know how easily they assault our civil liberties, or perhaps better stated our right to privacy. If assaulting theirs is how we convince the masses that they should not be there, then it is perhaps reasonable to do so. Ours are already under fire, the question is whether destroying theirs will produce a big enough result to make it worth it. I don't think the answer is clear-cut in general, and time will tell in this case, but I don't know that it's as cognitively dissonant as it seems. In the case of the government, they can't say “well we're watching everyone's conversations because so are the terrorists”. That makes their justification very different from the one in use here, and thus changes the equation a lot.