[VengefulCynic]

The most frustrating part about this to me is the certain knowledge that all of the informed parties are quite happily cherry-picking statistics to serve a political narrative and the majority of reporters and analysts are unable to do any sort of deep analysis of the source material because it's all classified.

The mere availability of source documents elevates the conversation from a juvenile process of people hurling meaningless statistics at each other. In the absence of actual data and redacted filings provided by the government, leaked documents such as provided by Manning and Snowden take on a new life. Instead of just statistics without context, there are documents that illuminate a court of law that's basically been a secret up to this point. Obviously those documents selectively serve a narrative, but ironicaly, they're made even more powerful by virtue of the fact that they're the first substantive look that much of the public has gotten at the FISC.