>With complete transparency comes little ability for security. Terrorist attempts become more frequent. Crime becomes more rampant and life become more unstable.

I understand how it can seem that way, and I'm not criticizing, but is there any evidence anywhere for these claims?

I don't know. It's a great question that demands an answer. However, I feel like finding those answers might take me down a Google hole I don't want to travel down at this point in the night ;-)

But I will ask you this. Is open government intelligence something that should be tested?

While I might be wrong with my claims, what's worrisome to most is that I'm not. And opening up intelligence as a test isn't exactly something that can be fixed with the next iteration.

>Terrorist attempts become more frequent.

Citation needed. We have no reason to believe that any actual terror attacks have been stopped. People who wanted to use terror against the US have either managed to or failed by their own incompetence. What we do know is that before we started getting insane about security there would be some attack about once every 10 years. Why do you imagine it's any higher frequency now?

And the part that irritates me the most is: if there is more frequency to the attacks, why aren't we trying to find out why and addressing that. If you think the answer is "they hate us for our freedoms" then you're simply an idiot.

> We have no reason to believe that any actual terror attacks have been stopped.

My guess would be that NSA guys probably take the fact that many Americans hold that view as a huge compliment. I'd be willing to be there's a whole book of "if only you knew".

(FWIW, I still don't think that warrants the program.)

Life is not a Hollywood movie. Hollywood movies, comic books and so on use larger than life figures doing larger than life activities to stop larger than life villains. In reality, no one on earth is that competent. The villains are usually not very good (often blowing themselves up alone with their bombs) and the "good guys" are usually not that great either (often corrupt themselves).

If the government actually were stopping constant terrorist activity (a) they wouldn't parade obvious entrapment cases as "wins", they'd pick something legit to make us feel safer and (b) someone would talk. One of the contractors, loud mouths, drunks, etc. would eventually leak something. A group as large as NSA wouldn't be able to keep their world-saving completely quiet forever, that's just unrealistic.

> If the government actually were stopping constant terrorist activity (a) they wouldn't parade obvious entrapment cases as "wins", they'd pick something legit to make us feel safer and (b) someone would talk. One of the contractors, loud mouths, drunks, etc. would eventually leak something. A group as large as NSA wouldn't be able to keep their world-saving completely quiet forever, that's just unrealistic.

Consider for a moment how long they've kept the fact that THEY HAVE A REALTIME MIRROR OF GOOGLE a near-total secret. Consider the fact that private companies like Apple and Google have been able to keep their source trees secret with far lower penalties for accidental/intentional disclosure and much less attention and fewer resources devoted to OPSEC.

Also, I think you are confusing FBI/LEO with NSA/military intelligence. It's the former that does those silly things. NSA never parades anything, ever. It's like STFU is in their DNA.

As far as the rest of the military goes: the coolest plane we know that they've built is the SR-71, which was built in... 1964. It's fifty years old. Do you suppose they've sat on their hands since then, with all the advances in materials and computer/avionics technology since? To put the R&D in perspective, it is believed that the NSA's Utah datacenter is built to store a yottabyte of data. The mind reels. Where do you think all that classified budget defense money is GOING, building shit that gets press releases?!

Keeping secrets is pretty straightforward, actually, if you're willing to go to the (order of magnitude increase in) trouble and expense. USDoD is.

Israel. They're under a constant threat of terrorism, but their intelligence has been relatively successful.

I was talking strictly about the US. I'm aware that there are actually places on this earth that have a problem with terrorism. The US isn't one of them.

Wow, after 9/11, after the boston marathon, after ricin and anthrax to the president, after the first world trade center bombing, after OKC bombing? These were actual events with actual deaths. These are actual problems in every definition of the word. I understand very well that Israel and other places have more frequent attacks (though few/none have had attacks on the scale that we have) but that does not exclude the US from having a problem.

Do you realize these events are decades apart? We have a terrorist death count of something like 100 people a year. 100 deaths a year in a country of ~350 million people isn't worth thinking about for one second.

>>Terrorist attempts become more frequent

> Citation needed.

My insinuation that terrorist attempts would become more frequent was IF our intelligence agencies opens up all its data to the public. I was not defending the competence of the US government's intelligence agencies.

Please read the opening post.

Sounds like the "security through obscurity" argument that gets flogged by the geek crowd.

Except that does actually work sometimes. Debian flat-out broke crypto for a couple of releases, yet it appears it was caught first by OpenSSL developers and not the black hats.