As I've said before, you should feel outraged at the penetration governments have into your private life in the name of security. As I've said before, you have no practical concerns from domestic surveillance because the NSA's basic approach to finding a needle in a haystack is to make sure the haystack is as big as possible in order to ensure that there's a needle in there somewhere. Look. The NSA has been busted trading your dick pics. The TSA has been busted scanning and trading and chortling over your body scans. Spooks will abuse data. That's what they do. But collectively, the data miners have no real agency or coordination to do anything truly nefarious. The reality of the situation is we have lived in a world where every communication made goes through the NSA since 2003 but even after Russian Intelligence passed the FBI a mash note saying "Hey, this Tsarniev guy is likely to be a problem" he was able to haul a pressure cooker full of nails, ball bearings and fertilizer explosive to a public place and set it off. Tashfeen Malik? Facebooked about supporting Jihad in 2012. These are legit terrorists with ties to recognized militant organizations and a travel pattern involving hotspots and training camps and the vast US surveillance apparatus failed utterly to so much as flag them for warning. How on earth are they going to figure out anything about you?
This would all be true unless you happen to make an enemy at the FBI, CIA, or NSA. Which is mostly a problem for politicians, so you'd think they'd be more concerned about domestic surveillance. Then again it's also a problem for political activists. John or Jane Q Activist starts to get some traction for their cause, which the government is very much against, so now they drill into this persons communications and find something to charge them with. There's always something. Which is a long-winded way of saying that it may not be a personal problem, but it is a political problem. Because it's hard to make political change when anybody who tries gets sent to prison.
Sure - but we're talking Julian Assange. To make an enemy of an entire three-letter bureau requires activism above and beyond the petty stuff that gets abused by spooks - after all, coordination generates paperwork and paperwork ends up in congressional hearings. It is a political problem, but then, it has been since the days of Herb Yeardley.
Further, Assange wanted the TLAs coming after him, thinking it would keep wikileaks and other people involved in the project safer if the heat was focused on him personally. It's unclear if he accomplished anything in doing so, Jacob Appelbaum had to move to Germany after all and he was just doing PR, but he knew what he was doing.