Well; even among HN commenters, you routinely see an astonishingly naïve, civics-class knee-jerk tendency to outright ridicule any suggestion of extra-legality,

Well; even among HN commenters, you routinely see an astonishingly naïve, civics-class knee-jerk tendency to outright ridicule any suggestion of extra-legality, duplicity or wrongdoing on the part of security agencies as tinfoil blather[1]. You would have thought people's priors would have changed in light of what we know today, but that would discount the enduring effect of some deeply-rooted notions about trust, benignness and law prevalent in many well-meaning circles in the US. So maybe this is part of that. [1] See for instance the recent discussion on TrueCrypt, with some commenters refusing to believe any agency would force the developers to install a backdoor, due to the ostensible lack of any known explicit legal precedent or authority in the public domain, etc.