This "newspeak" with regard to government activity (and the intelligence apparatus especially) bothers me. It enables soundbites where government officials can say things like "no, we don't collect X", with essentially no real repurcussions by the other (legislative, judicial) branches of government that are supposed to keep them in check.

You can see some discomfort with this status quo in some of the questions that people like Senator Wyden pose to officials from the executive branch, but unless you already have the secret decoder ring (which CNN and their ilk at least pretend to not have) you miss the point entirely if you just follow the popular news. This makes it easy to gain popular support for agencies like the NSA since topics like this are of minor interest to most of the voting base, and most people won't dig deep enough to see what they really mean when they say things like that.

I really hope that we get something equivalent to the Church commision in the next decade or so to mitigate the potential damage that could result from our current intelligence apparatus, but I'm not too hopeful. I feel like the information that Snowden provided was our best chance for that, but I don't see enough popular support to convince our elected representitives that it's in their best interests.