Because little fish get eaten by the big ones, local autonomous communities need to organize/centralize themselves to defend their autonomy. This is my basic critique of movements like Occupy. They are very conscious of the will to power and the iron law of oligarchy, and identify it with any kind of centralized authority structure. I understand their concerns, but the challenge is to find an accountable, centralized structure that strikes the right balance between the need for centralized coordination and local autonomy and decision making. It's very hard to do, but getting gobbled up is what happens if you don't.
Mutually Assured Destruction prevents the great powers from going to war with one another, so I think we will see 'will to power' in American and other societies shifting from the military to the economic spheres, and we will see the primary focus of the security state moving away from concerns about external threats from hostile states to internal threats from stateless subversives waging asymmetric campaigns of sabotage. The Bush administration's response to 9/11 was absurd because it misconstrued the threat and response to it in military rather than police terms. With the revelations of the extent of the NSA surveillance program, we're seeing how far we have come in moving toward the police state.
I'm not all that clear how this is going to play out over the next several years, but two observations. First, as the authoritarian police state in China becomes more like the US in adopting neoliberal economic policies, the U.S. will become more like China in adopting authoritarian police-state policies. China's embrace of state capitalism gives it the advantage in any kind of economic warfare with the U.S. because it has the more centralized model.The US will gradually realize that it will have to adapt.
Second, in the meanwhile, it looks as though the US government is gradually transforming into the appendage of competing economic warlords. As such, government will function more as corporate security services in the locales in which they operate. These warlords will use regional governments and their high-tech surveillance and security infrastructure to keep the workers docile and dependent. We're not there yet, but we appear to be transitioning into something like this.
If this is the direction in which we are headed, the NSA and other government surveillance systems are not a problem because of their potential abuse by politicians, but because of their potential abuse by the corporate powers these politicians serve. If Snowden, a man who works in the private sector, has access to the information that he does, who's to say that others haven't been using the same information for other extra-legal purposes. Why would we assume that that no one is?
It no longer matters much what is technically legal or illegal, because these corporations are writing their own laws, and even if they break laws, who is there to hold them accountable? If there is no power (or will) to make laws in the public interest and to enforce them, it doesn't matter what's legal or illegal regarding abuses of power. If government continues to evolve into a mere appendage of the big corporations, we should have no expectation that anyone powerful is accountable to the public. The law will be used exclusively to keep the public in line.