>The public cannot possibly assess their performance.

Respectfully, that's not true. Secret programs can still be judged on their inputs and outputs: eg "we spent $50B and averted 17 attacks, saving potentially 15,000 lives and $500B in economic damage." What possible information can that give an adversary?

I consider it more like the defense of American football. A good defense is good. They could not allow the opposing offense to score any points all game. What should the defense claim? "We prevented 21 points from being scored!" No. They have no idea how many points they prevented.

NSA is a thankless organization. You don't know all the things they've done well, and they get blamed whenever anything bad happens.

It's pretty straightforward to quantify how good a football defensive team is.

> We had 5 sacks, 3 interceptions, and limited the opposing offense to 200yards gained.

Is obviously better than

> We had 0 sacks, 0 interceptions, and the opposing offense took 400 yards.

Even if in both games the opposing offense scored the same number of points.

I agree, it's not a perfect analogy. I think the point stands.

I think his point is it possible to quantify what the NSA does and not reveal anything classified. Similar to how you can quantify how good a football defense is even if you don't know every play, or anything about their strategies, who is on there team, how many players were on the field.

Are there many/any government agencies that quantify things to validate their existence?

Schools have tests. I get a newsletter from my local government a few times a year that says how they are spending my money, especially if they are pushing for a levy. Any program that is in jeopardy of losing funding publishing some sort of "this is why you should keep giving us money" like NASA or an arts program. For example: https://www.nasa.gov/news/budget/index.html

I think the point is, it's your/our fucking money, and they should be.

We're here arguing about whether the defense is any good at their job, but nobody's asking about the long-term CTE caused by the team playing the game in the first place.

If we as a populous were good coaches/managers, we'd be using the players to protect our house, and alert us to better ways to secure it.

>"we spent $50B and averted 17 attacks, saving potentially 15,000 lives and $500B in economic damage." What possible information can that give an adversary?

The average operation cost of 17 successfully averted attacks is $2.94B.

More to the point of holding secret organizations accountable, though, is the fact that you do not know if that is information or misinformation.