[GVIrish]

For one, the United States has a ton of enemies because of dirty and mean things we have done to other countries. Maybe if we fixed our foreign policy and stopped dropping bombs on poor people there'd be less people that hate us. That would be a lot simpler than making people hate us more by spying on them, installing backdoors in encryption standards, spending billions of dollars on said spying, not having proper auditing of said spying, and putting our democracy at risk due to said spying.

As for the monitoring preventing a terrorist attack:

A. As of yet they have not been able to demonstrate that they have successfully prevented an attack based on information they gained through the NSA. The best they could show was that they arrested some taxi cab driver in California who sent $8500 to some militants.

B. Even if the massive spying prevented some attacks, you have to ask, "at what cost?" This type of unaccountable intelligence apparatus has the very real potential to undermine our democracy and turn the United States into a police state. In some ways that is already happening. And if you get too far down the road towards an authoritarian government, some humanities worst atrocities await.

Terrorists may have killed thousands in the last century, but murderous governments have killed 10's of millions, potentially over 100 million. And I'm not talking about war, I'm talking about state-sanctioned murder. I'd rather take my chances with the occassional nutjob with a pressure cooker than an oppressive government .

[GVIrish]

I'm not saying we need to get rid of the NSA completely, but it should be dramatically curbed and it should have a lot more independent and transparent oversight. From the get-go dragnet spying on Americans should be ended.