No, this is post-9/11. It only started with the PATRIOT Act. I vividly remember the Clipper chip debates in Congress. This is that on steroids, with no disclosure what-so-ever. In the communist block, that was different, of course. But in the West, you used to laugh and sneer at Stasi and Soviet "papers, please!".
The Crypto AG case is a stronger argument for his point than yours: the targets were foreign, which is to say legal for the NSA to spy on, and it was done with the involvement of the company.
In the current era, the targets are often domestic and they're willing to compromise U.S. companies on a large scale to do it.
The only reason this wasn't happening in the days of J Edgar Hoover, was due to technological limitations.
Echelon dates to the late 1960s.
COINTELPRO went on for two decades starting from 1956.
Privacy and rights abuses have been rampant among the three letter agencies since their originations. Today, they can scale the privacy invasion. That's the sole difference from their side. Previously they'd just violate someone's rights and go about their business, good luck proving it or fighting it at a small scale as a specific target of one of these agencies.
McCarthy was right, and the criticism based on his conjuring daemons that weren't there, as popular as it has been, is misguided. If anything, as the archives open after all these years, they show the Soviet threat and the extent of infiltration was far greater than anybody even imagined.
Watergate was a quaint bespoke little operation. Much wider unconstrained eavesdropping capability is available to grunts like Snowden on tap. And all the perpetrators were indicted or jailed[0]. A president even was made to resign.
If anything, the magnitude of the threat the Un-American Activities Committee dealt with, and the constrains Nixon faced (both technical during, and legal after the fact) provide a contrast to the post-PATRIOT-Act reality of threats and constrains, all imaginary at best.
