Obama has been clear about supporting the need for intelligence, but also repeatedly talked about the need to keep it constitutional and protect civil liberties

Obama has been clear about supporting the need for intelligence, but also repeatedly talked about the need to keep it constitutional and protect civil liberties -- highlighting the contrast with Bush. And the law is so obscure (and they're soooo good at confusing the issue) that it's very hard to explain. Until this recent high-profile coverage, I don't think most Millennials (or older people for that matter) understood the scale of NSA tracking -- or how FISA's section 702's extremely broad orders, and the lack of meaningful oversight, means that particularized court orders aren't required to eavesdrop on Americans. And so on. Now it's a lot more concrete and visceral. The NSA is tracking all your phone calls. They lied about it to Congress. They have access to all the internet metadata and content -- and if you encrypt, your communications are treated as suspicious. So yeah, people could have known this before. Clearly they didn't -- remember this is a country where [insert favorite statistics here about the uninformed population]. But they do now, and they don't like it.