Looks like I'm a little late for this comment party, but I'd just like to highlight one comment from the Forbes website that I thought was good:<p>"In general I agree with McCoy in his ad-hoc debate with Gen Alexander as well as his post presentation remarks about the distorted perspective of national security. At the same time, I do conceed that the NSA is acting in good faith and ‘within the law’ as presented to them via the Patriot Act. I have similar feeling about the value of TSA, but whereas the TSA is a publicly disclosed program, my most pressing concern with the NSA is the secrecy of it. First, the secrecy presents an extremely high degree of risk (in terms of both the probabilty of occurance as well as the dangers) of mission creep. I doubt Congressional nor FISC oversight are adequate to mitigate this risk. Second, secrecy is not really a valid tool for deterence. Anti-terrorism programs are like a doomsday devices: it’s a good deterence only if it is widely known about (see Dr Strangelove). Moreover, while secret programs might be good for support of kill/capture programs, it is far from clear that such efforts reduce terrorism.<p>For all I know, the government spy/drone program is to terrorists as a hammer is to an ant colony. If you have a spilled pot of honey in the kitchen, it doesn’t matter how good you are at spotting and smashing ants. I want to know these things, so that I can help shape public policy through the ballot box."
--uspatriot2001<p>I think that's a good assessment of the high-level picture, and it's much more informative than "NSA BAD! Freedom good!" (not to belittle anyone's comments here) in that it reflects a road forward.