Their behavior when the leak happened makes it pretty clear that isnt going to happen. They kept going on and on about attacks prevented but never really gave any evidence that the program alone made the difference between attack prevented and attack successful. Then again to convince people like classical hero who dont want to critically think they dont have to, they merely have to mention the big mean boogie man out to get people and that's satisfactory evidence.
There are a few incidents that happened
despite the NSA's invasive surveillance programs.
-Lashkar e Taiba's insane assault in Mumbai
-Al Shabab assault in Nairobi at a mall
-Times Square [attempted] bombing
-Boston Bombings
And what of the dozens of cases in the last few years where the FBI basically convinces some poor guy to go and try to blow something up, only arresting him after selling him the fake explosives and such? Where was the NSA then??
These are just the things that spring to mind
off the top of my head. I'm sure there have been plenty of other incidents even further back that the NSA programs should have caught. Well, "should have", if we take the NSA's public statement at face value.
But whenever a director of an agency is caught blatantly lying to Congress, we need to automatically assume that everything else they say may not be true.
Snowden's leaks to journalists allow us to better evaluate the effectiveness of these programs and, therefore, taxpayer dollars. Not that I think taxpayer rights are the primary issue here, to be clear
