I think there's a common misconception that the public at-large has very little effect on the government. I also think that there's an exhaustively pathetic lack of public knowledge about how the government works, how our laws are created, how they are enforced, and what our laws actually are.
When I say the government doesn't really care about what it knows on us, that's really rather true. The government has access to your phones, your bank accounts, your medical records, etc, but what do they really care? Are they going to raid your house and make you disappear because you've got kidney stones, a failing 401k and you talk to wh0res on the phone? No. They have no reason to spend the money and manpower for that. If anything, they'll take statistics on that and use it for or against some bill on the hill, but otherwise, they really don't care.
For the most part, the things you say and do, no one ever actually sees, even if it's monitored by the government.
For example (true scenario) your email. Most email is monitored by the government (handled by the NRO and FBI, with policy from the NRO and CIA). However, before you get paranoid, know that hardly any eyes actually see your email. In the NRO (literally ~7 miles from where I live) there's a room about the size of two Wendy's full of racks of computer towers recieving data (directly and from several external hubs) mostly concerned with email and Internet chatter. Those machines compile the data into a really simple Connect-4 style array of stacks. Much of what you say goes into the garbage, but keywords (like terrorist, bank, rape, piracy, etc) get queued up in stacks in a database. Then, based on a statistical analysis program within the network, emails marked "suspicious" due to high rates of certain activity (terrorist talk, criminal talk, whatever) get forward to a seperate queue. This then goes to a room down the hall with twenty-some nerds in it wearing blue button-up shirts with mickey-mouse ties, where they take the suspicious emails, run them through yet another system to split them up into category, priority and any number of other specifics, and then they get blown onto a screen at a government-purchased PC where this little army of nerds pours through like speed-readers on crack. Anything noteworthy gets sent up through the government beurocracy to be analyzed and possibly physically checked on...The rest get stored or destroyed.
In short, if you sent an email with the words "blow up bank" every day, you can bet that within two weeks or so, someone's been bugged about it. Keep doing it, and you'll be remotely examined. Since you likely will prove to not pose any real threat, you'll never see anyone. That's just the way things work. That's how they sort through all this stuff.
Now lets say you sent those emails every day...but when they got pinged about your emails, the computers (and the nerds possibly) checked you out, they found your emails were getting sent to Iraq, that you have a criminal record, are an active protester, and have friends who are skin-heads...guess what? Yer likely to get fully profiled, and even get a visit somewhere.
There's nothing sinister about this. That's pretty much the only way you can enforce the law and protect the citizens.
Let's move on to B. "How many things the public think are secrets that are actually publically available knowledge."
How many people you know, know how the US government makes laws? Heck, I don't know about you, but I got some coworkers who probably can't even remember that we have other parts of the government besides the "President and that guy who has a lesbian-wannabe daughter."
Conspiracies often arise from a lack of true knowledge. That, combined with the fact that most Americans are lazy, it's not hard to see how so many people think that there're these evil gears turning somewhere that result in laws.
Then there's things that you don't need to know, because you don't need to know and it's safer that you don't know. I'm talking about military secrets and infrastructer secrets.
For example, it's not public knowledge where every deployed troop is in the world at any given time. This isn't evil or bad...this is for the protection of ourselves and our troops. I'm sure you can see why.
Infrastructure security is probably the hardest for people to wrap around...but it's no less understandable or needed.
For example, certain bandwidths of communication are restricted from public use, because the military uses them to communicate and our government's computers talk on this secure segment of the bandwidth. Why would we want specifications concerning the latest engine improvement for our nuclear subs, or orders for our troops in Iraq, being aired right alongside the morning news? And if anyone could pick this stuff up easy, it wouldn't be that secure, would it? So you have the widely considered "evil half" of the FCC, which controls devices which could potentially tap into secure networks of communication. If someone is caught "listening in" on a secured government band, you can bet they will at least be getting a visit from the police real soon. That's not unreasonable or shady...that's the protection of the systems which protect us.
Don't know about you, but I don't want anyone tapping into our secure communications.
And lets not forget that these laws, and the laws that empower our government and police to enforce and protect us, are public knowledge. There's no secret iluminati PC somewhere with the laws of the US on it. Go visit the National Archives. It's required that all laws, government and public, must be kept on public file. That's a neccessity of a democracy, not to mention that our government is so publicly monitored that they have to.
You'd be surprised the stuff you can find. I went to the National-Archives one day to look up the laws regarding the government's role in the FCC.
Okay, so I talked yer leg off once again. Sorry. I just don't see any excuse to live life on hearsay and rumor. I used to think about this stuff (I'm not paranoid, but I'm not stupid either) so I made an effort to try and figure out what actually goes on. I had no clue how laws actually got made, or how the FCC blocks channels from me and why. Hell, I used to think the President said "make it so" and so it was.
One last thing. Anyone who thinks our government is really oppressive and beligerant and such, needs to go do some travelling. I've been to countries on every continent except Antarctica, and there ain't nothing like the US. Only a handful of countries can compare moderately to the level of freedom and public access that Americans enjoy.
