Agreed. However, this is my favorite part of Greenwald's piece, quting marcy wheeler at emptywheel:

As Marcy Wheeler documents, there is no plausible argument that the Patriot Act and FISA reforms sought by civil libertarians would have impeded the Zazi investigation at all, since the Government had evidence from that start that Zazi was tied to Al-Qaeda and involved in an active terrorist plot, and it used that evidence to obtain court approval. If anything, the well-executed, apparently law-abiding Zazi investigation proves that these surveillance reforms are perfectly consistent with -- not impediments to -- effective Terrorism investigations. Yet here we have the Obama administration anonymously reciting the standard Cheneyite justification for these powers (we stopped a scary Terrorist attack and that proves we need them), and the Post just recites it all uncritically.
Britain lives with a super-surveillance society, and is arguably edging toward a Total Information Awareness society; all cameras, wiretaps, data bases throughout all the government agencies, foreign and domestic, linked. Do their citizens care?