[ohazi]

When the dirty laundry eventually gets aired, the official reasons are usually nonsensical assertions that allowing the public to know what our government is doing is somehow helping terrorists avoid detection and capture.

I think many of the people who came up with this stuff know that a lot of it is questionably legal at best. The justification of these gag orders is therefore to hide the prevalence of the questionable behavior, allowing those responsible to continue what they're doing for as long as possible.