No, surveillance is not a threat to democracy, people not caring about democracy is what threatens democracy.
Democracy has never been a right, it's always been a privilege that people demanded, and guess what, when people stop demanding it, power will naturally collude.
I'm still not seeing how that makes warrantless secret surveillance with gag orders and secret courts reporting to special committees not a threat to democracy.
OP means they aren't in and of themselves a problem if the citizens do their job and hold their democratic government accountable and force it to abide by their collective decisions.
I don't agree, though; I think secret surveillance is in and of itself anti-democratic. However, OP is correct too, in the sense that once it is revealed that secret, illegal surveillance is going on, if the subjects of a functioning democracy don't care or take any action, that is probably even more corrosive to a democratic state (since presumably there will eventually always be people like Norden^W Snowden, and nothing stays secret forever).
In my opinion, in a real democracy the citizens are not passive voters but a vigilant, armed (at least in the US) populace that holds their representatives accountable and vocally prevents unchecked accumulations of power or other undemocratic tactics (i.e. the electoral college turning into a two-party system). In my utopian view of what a democracy should be, a revelation like this would result in a very significant portion of the people speaking out and actively working to squash the surveillance system, putting the system to work instead of threatening it. Of course, such a society wouldn't let the surveillance situation progress so far and if you view democracy as a voting populace, not an informed one, my argument isn't convincing :)
You can't have a democracy without citizens who are able to think freely.
You can't think freely when you are aware that an invisible entity is constantly watching every phone call you make and every web page you surf to. Knowing you're under surveillance changes your behavior.
"Inverted totalitarianism is all politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash."
What we need is this:
The Theory of Communicative Action has three interrelated concerns: (1) to develop a concept of rationality that is no longer tied to, and limited by, the subjectivistic and individualistic premises of modern philosophy and social theory; (2) to construct a two-level concept of society that integrates the lifeworld and systems paradigms; and, finally, (3) to sketch out, against this background, a critical theory of modernity which analyzes and accounts for its pathologies in a way that suggests a redirection rather than an abandonment of the project of enlightenment.
I agree with your point that apathy is a threat to democracy, but there are multiple threats to an open and fair system, and a surveillance state is one of them.
I would argue that most (if not all other) internal threats to a democracy are a subset of the vigilance and apathy problem.
If the surveillance state existed before the democracy and continued on without the consent of the governed, then it wasn't a democracy to begin with. If the citizens allowed a surveillance state to take root or their vigilance slipped, then continued vigilance would keep the surveillance state in check. However, I'm making the assumption here that for the surveillance state to take enough power to make it unstoppable (without violent revolution), it would have to grow to the point where its secrecy is no longer maintainable, and the aforementioned vigilance would take over and bring in the rains.
Now that I've written that, it all seems like semantics...
Additionally "surveillance" is far too general a concept to be considered harmful or helpful in and of itself. The determining factor lies in the system that surrounds it.
In other words, a "democratic surveillance state" isn't an oxymoron. Nor it it necessarily a bad thing. However, it differs sharply from an authoritarian surveillance state, which is invariably horrible.
Writing for the Washington Post, Mike Konczal elaborates on this distinction in the best surveillance-related piece I've read post-PRISM.
Pretty sure that whoever down-voted this didn't actually read the link. Here's the key passage:
"As Aaron Bady has argued in MIT’s Technology Review, the language and concepts for privacy evolved in a world where “walls” were still the dominant metaphor. Peeking through a wall was sufficient to prove you violated someone’s privacy. But technology has opened up a brand new world where walls no longer exist, or things exist in so many places that the idea of walls makes no sense. Without them we need new concepts.
As is often the case, the battle between authoritarianism and democracy can do a lot of the mental work. One of the great things about democracy is its ability to check private and government power, as well as creating institutional structure promoting accountability and transparency. And I fear it is the only way out of the situation our country faces."
The point is that the definition of surveillance itself is changing along with the concept of privacy, leading to shifts in previously-stable balances of power. To a very large extent, these changes - which have both positive and negative aspects - are byproducts of a larger technological shift which has already brought far to many advantages to reverse.
In other words, we need to develop new social norms and structures to ensure the safety of what could otherwise be very dangerous system. We don't have to do this from scratch, but the familiar frames of reference do need updating. And that starts with recognizing that "surveillance" by itself, is neither good nor bad (depending on who is watching who, under what circumstances, and why), but that it can easily be either depending on the context.
Democracy has never been a right, it's always been a privilege that people demanded, and guess what, when people stop demanding it, power will naturally collude.