LOS ANGELES — The string of revelations about sweeping government surveillance of American telephone records and Internet activity by foreigners, including email, stirred expressions of concern across the country Friday — along with something of a collective national shrug.

It is not that people were not upset to learn the government might be tracking their telephone calls, Facebook posts and Yahoo accounts. It is that in this age of “Homeland,” and a culture that encourages people to share photos and minute-by-minute activities and opinions on public websites, the news that the government might be looking in, too, was something short of a surprise.

“I think it stinks,” said Steve Talley, 64, a retired state worker in Mount Airy, N.C., a small, conservative town near the border with Virginia. But, he added, “it’s been going on forever. … I don’t mean to be cynical, but this is nothing new. If people think the government hasn’t been monitoring whatever they want to, whenever they want to, they are sorely mistaken.”

At the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago, Cedric Hudson, 55, an unemployed machine technician who described himself as a Democrat proud to be from Obama’s home state, said he was resigned to these kinds of governmental intrusions.

“It doesn’t bother me because the government is going to do what they’re going to do regardless of what anyone thinks,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”

Still, he said, he was not happy the government was invoking concerns about terrorism to justify this kind of surveillance. “When they want to pry in your business, that’s the excuse they use. I just don’t trust them.”

Across the country, people began absorbing what was proving to be at times a confusing barrage of disclosures on precisely what the government was doing. Initially, it appeared that the government was doing extensive data-mining — looking at photos, videos, email and postings — on all sorts of social media. But U.S. officials, in acknowledging the existence of the data-mining program over the past seven years, said its target was limited to foreign figures.

And while the disclosures drew heavy criticism from civil rights advocates and some members of Congress, many Republicans and Democrats expressed their support for a program that they had voted for, and reauthorized, in the sweep of national security legislation passed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In fact, prospects for a legislative response to curtail monitoring of Internet and telephone communications appear remote.

By every indication, the continued concern about domestic terrorism has colored the way Americans are reacting to intrusions in their privacy.

Rob Johnson, 21, a recent graduate from University of Iowa who moved to Chicago to develop a smartphone app, said he considered it an appropriate trade-off in a post-9/11 world.

“I’d rather have them track who we’re talking to if it saves American lives,” he said. “I think it’s OK for them to be that invasive.

“I think it’s something that we have to get used to,” Johnson added. “Your habits and activities are being watched. I already assume that Google is tracking everything I do.”