So I'll believe that they stopped something when they produce the details for the press to investigate.
For example, if TSA being onerous convinces a significant number of people to drive for their medium distance trips instead of fly, more people will die because driving is more dangerous than flying.
Also, it's not exactly a 1-to-1 comparison, but for every 700,000 hours(ish) you force people to wait or delay their day in some fashion, you're causing an entire lifetime of inconvenience. It's better than taking an infant from its mother and shooting it, but it's still taking an entire lifetime of potential and destroying it through boredom and frustration.
I know I'm leaning pretty heavy on TSA examples here, but we've also seen they can't even reliably stop weapons from coming through security in predictable and repeatable ways. So, "we" decided that a trade off between security and freedom was prudent, we implemented that trade off, and then we found out we only received the downsides and none of the upsides.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/public-documents-contradict...
Precrime is already here and nobody is batting a damned eyelid.
I think it just comes down to the trade off of freedom vs. loss of life.
I mean that's what it's really about, isn't it? We are giving up the freedom of privacy for the potential of more security?
Yet, This is not the American Way
At one point we realized that in order to protect the freedoms of our people we had to die. That's why so many fought in the revolutionary war. To protect our rights and freedoms as citizens against the State (England, at the time).
If we just lay down like dogs now and let our government walk over us like dogs, all those lives will have been wasted.