Privacy Isn’t All We’re Losing by Peggy Noonan in Wall Street Journal is one of the best I have read on the NSA issue. Much of what she says can be 
applied to FATCA, IRS, FBAR, OVDI, etc.
If—again, if—what Mr. Snowden says is substantially true, the surveillance state will in time encourage an air of subtle oppression, and encourage too a sense of paranoia that may in time—not next week, but in time, as the years unfold—loosen and disrupt the ties the people of America feel to our country.
Americans and former Americans living outside US have already experienced that. Many of us now feel only animosity.
Peggy Noonan wonders what can be done
So what’s needed? We must realize this is a crucial moment: We either go forward with these programs now or we stop, and think.
Unfortunately, US seems to have lost the ability to stop and think. We have been repeatedly told that the FATCA train has left the station. If it doesn’t derail, there will be more and more passengers jump off the citizenship train as soon as they can. Many of us who left the citizenship train years or decades ago are not about to get back on it–not even for visits.
How did we get here? You know.
I particularly like this sentence in her article:
“The price too is a knowledge, based on human experience and held by all but fools and children, that the gleanings of the surveillance state will eventually be used by the mischievous, the malicious and the ignorant in ways the creators of the system did not intend.”
The scary thing is, that’s already happening.
Philip K. Dick wrote ‘The Minority Report’ in 1956, and I read it sometime in the 1980’s. It was a good, rollicking tale because it seemed so far-fetched.
Now it seems sadly prescient.