I think your interpretation of the quote is a bit too simplistic. Franklin's meaning is that any minor level of security you gain from any freedom surrendered is undeserved.
That doesn't change anything.
Again: There is always a tradeoff between privacy and law enforcement. Is it feasible to get rid of the police? Wiretaps? Police searches? Should we say that the police are completely barred from stopping citizens and asking questions? Should the police be barred from entering an apartment when actively chasing a subject?
We cannot choose "freedom" exclusively, as then we would have no law enforcement capabilities whatsoever. That's simply not an option. We need to make
reasonable and deliberate choices about the trade-offs between security and liberty.
In the case of the NSA dragnet the system takes away everyone's right to privacy in order to save us each from a terrorist threat that, on an individual basis, is very small.
Americans have spent the past decade demanding more and more protections from terrorists. The Patriot Act was not passed in secret. The Patriot Act was not
renewed in secret. The phone surveillance is far from new -- we've known about it for a few years now. Public outcry at the time was... muted.
We don't know a lot about PRISM yet. What we
do know is that the NSA has been building a mammoth facility in a Utah desert. We also know that the Internet was not designed with security in mind, that email and HTTP are completely unsecured in transit, and that the companies who provide us all these wonderful services at no cost have long since shredded our privacy. Scott McNeally didn't intend it as a warning, but was telling us that we had no privacy on the Internet back in 1999.
To me, the shocking part is that people
don't realize that the NSA has been tracking everything they can suck up into their databases. (As have Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Amazon and pretty much every major technology and social media company.)
On a side note, the US does not have any real privacy protections. It has no explicit protections in our Constitution, and our legislators don't take it very seriously. In contrast, the EU has much stricter privacy protections and regulations.
We have the option to get serious about reining in government. We shouldn't need a military contractor violating espionage laws to tell us to get serious.
History as shown Franklin to be wise since most dictatorships are built on an incremental abdication of freedom in order to combat some perceived enemy.
No, actually, it hasn't.
Lots of dictatorships and totalitarian states rise to power fairly quickly, and clamp down afterwards. E.g. Iran went from the Shah's government collapsing, to Islamic hard-liners taking control, in 6-8 months, and it was after they took power that they clamped down. The Nazis suspended a whole bunch of civil liberties in 1933, pretty much in a matter of months. When the PRC took over, they didn't wait around to set up a police state; neither did the Japanese when they invaded Manchuria.
A coup, by definition, is not an incremental process. And plenty of authoritarian governments gained power in coups.
It can also take long histories and traditions of authoritarianism to produce a political environment conducive to authoritarian control. Europe, for example, had centuries of monarchical and feudal rule, and relatively short periods of electoral rule before the paroxysms of totalitarianism in the 30s and 40s.
We've also seen plenty of instances of electoral governments going back and forth on intrusive policies. McCarthy became increasingly authoritarian in his pursuit of anti-Communism, and after a few years of hysteria the nation pulled back from that brink. Domestic spying was curtailed (though not stopped completely) for a few decades, when COINTELPRO was shut down. The US is slowly relaxing its intense desire to suspend every civil liberty in the name of fighting terrorism.
Basically, it's not valid to oppose every policy on the grounds that it "might" be an incremental step towards totalitarianism. That rhetorical flourish could be -- no, is -- used to oppose such a wide variety of policies, that it detracts from formulating more precise guidelines about what should or should not be acceptable.