> Or maybe there's some reason to keep a foiled attack a secret? There absolutely would be: SIGINT 101 is that you don't reveal your information gathering abil

> Or maybe there's some reason to keep a foiled attack a secret? There absolutely would be: SIGINT 101 is that you don't reveal your information gathering abilities, lest your opponnent move to new communications channels. In WW2, the Allies often learned of attacks due to code-breaking, and chose not to reveal them, so as to preserve the long-term strategic value of future intel. (The wartime morality of letting 1,000 die today to ostensibly save 10,000 tomorrow is left as an exercise for the reader.) I do give our agencies the benefit of the doubt, that there are probably are real threats, and they are probably acting in good faith. But I still find the current scope of spying and databasing to be dangerous, un-American, and inhuman. Terrorism, as horrible as it is, will always be an improbable statistical outlier. But when state power slides into tyranny, it is pervasive, ongoing, and difficult to undo. Preventing the latter should be our highest priority, or we have failed to learn from history. Something tells me it's a lesson we'll be learning the hard way.