Like I said, I wholeheartedly agree that privacy is a fundamental right. But, I would like to see more people acknowledging the flip side of the argument.
1) All the public ones they have published on their website are false, made-up bullshit. You'd expect the NSA bringing forward some credible evidence of thwarting terrorist plots in light of incredibly heavy criticism, yet they can't.(the article says 13, but it was later proved that it was exactly 0.)
2) From that, we can infer that, if your assumption of people wanting to hurt the U.S. is true, only old fashioned ways of countering terrorism work e.g. human intelligence.
3)"There are people out there wanting to hurt the US" sounds rather naive fox-news-like.
After September 11th some Americans thought a mass termination of people in Afghanistan would be a good idea (you had to be an adult or teenager at the time, people spoke this, they certainly did not print it in the NYTimes.)
The point is, once you begin making judgements solely on outcomes, those judgements become amoral. That can be ok when its an amoral activity, like optimizing server architecture, but when the activity involves who to kill and not to kill, the decisions last forever.
Unfortunately, there's no way to independently verify this statement. Only those inside the security apparatus have any data to examine this but they have a clear incentive to make themselves look indispensable (and indeed, get more funding).
They claimed 52 or 53 at first, then lowered that number to 1.
Then to zero.
There is no evidence whatsoever that this dragnet surveillance has been useful in any way whatsoever in fighting terrorism.
I think you might also be seriously overestimating how many people actually want to attack the US. Terrorists have more or less become a boogeyman at this point, the chances of anyone in the west experiencing a terrorist attack are so ridiculously small.
I agree that more transparency is necessary, and that we must have an intelligent debate, leading, ultimately to dismantling the current mass-surveillance apparatus. But I disagree about the "undoubtedly" part. If you'd said "maybe" I might have agreed, but there's just no evidence. There is evidence of abuses, but no evidence of successes.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140111/22360125843/nsa-go...
We don't know this. In any case, it's the wrong question as we have to ask ourselves what the cost really is. The gov could just implement a curfew, lock everyone up in their homes and then we'd all be 'safe'. This the fodder of many a scifi movie and it would certainly thwart the plans of 'bad guys'.