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Why not just pass laws to stop snooping?

Laws only stop law abiding people. Some people obey because they think it's right. Others because they're afraid of getting caught. But what about everyone else?
For example, the U.S. government ignores existing laws limiting surveillance. Why would it pay attention to new ones?
How effective were the EU's privacy laws when the U.S. demanded airline passenger information on EU citizens, or details on EU bank transfers? And one government's laws don't stop another from spying on them. The legal fig leaf of "You spy on my people for me and I'll spy on yours" has been used for decades.
Governments are police states to the degree their resources and people allow. In practice that means they are only limited by their resources. Populaces who refuse to allow mass surveillance are in vanishingly short supply.
The only effective way to stop mass surveillance is to make it cost too much. For communications we know how to do this. End-to-end crypto pushes the surveillance away from central switches to the individual end points. This raises the cost enough that no one can afford to spy on everyone.

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