That's an interesting thought experiment.

As I see it, we Americans in general are people who don't like limiting ourselves. We like making decisions based on what we know works, and what we know doesn't work. This means that it's only after problems are experienced that policies are made to prevent them in the future. We press the envelope... and our government does the same as anyone else does.

When a person is in a position of power over the well-being of others, there are times when you're damned if you do one thing and damned if you don't, as well.

The US has always been gung-ho when it comes to competitions on the international stage - such as the arms race in the Cold War with the Soviet Union... and now the NSA's race to know everything in the world through wiretapping everything.

History will teach us what went wrong, and what went right, but it's difficult to convince government officials to not use the tools at their disposal for what they view to be the public good.

Thankfully, those who designed and popularized the internet seem to have planned things out really well, so that we don't end up with an Orwellian future. The fact that the internet was designed as a distributed system with what was up until now, an insecure protocol for communication by default seems to me to have been a gambit to encourage government officials to work for the rapid uptake of the technology, exactly because it provides such an easy avenue for intelligence.

The truth however, is that a distributed network that can be used with encryption can go dark pretty much overnight whenever the public sees the need, and then the government doesn't even have the strings that they could pull with the telephone companies. I don't think it's a coincidence that the US government wants to publicly force through back doors into encryption at the same time they have ruled that internet organizations should be regulated as a common carrier. Those things have always gone together in their minds, haven't they?