I urge everyone here to read this article about Congressman Pike's fight against the NSA: http://pando.com/2014/02/04/the-first-congressman-to-battle-the-nsa-i

I urge everyone here to read this article about Congressman Pike's fight against the NSA: http://pando.com/2014/02/04/the-first-congressman-to-battle-the-nsa-is-dead-no-one-noticed-no-one-cares http://pando.com/2014/02/04/the-first-congressman-to-battle-... This part especially stuck out to me: > Pike was less interested in sensational scandals like Church’s poison darts and foreign assassination plots than he was in getting to the guts of the intelligence apparatus, its power, its funding, its purpose. He asked questions never asked or answered since the start of the Cold War: What was America’s intelligence budget? What was the purpose of the CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies and programs? Were they succeeding by their own standards? Were taxpayers getting their money’s worth? Were they making America safer? > Those were exactly the questions that the intel apparatus did not want asked. The Church Committee focused on excesses and abuses, implying that with the proper reforms and oversights, the intelligence structures could be set right. But as the Pike Committee started pulling up the floorboards, what they discovered quickly led Rep. Pike and others to declare that the entire intelligence apparatus was a dangerous boondoggle. Not only were taxpayers getting fleeced, but agencies like the NSA and CIA were a direct threat to America’s security and democracy, the proverbial monkey playing with a live grenade. The problem was that Pike asked the right questions—and that led him to some very wrong answers, as far as the powers that be were concerned. From what I've noticed, nobody is asking these questions today, and yet NSA and CIA keep getting bigger and bigger funding, with NSA having nothing to show for it and yet with expanding capabilites, and CIA wanting more funds mainly to operate more drone strikes in secret (i.e. covert wars). This is a path that's actually dangerous for national security, either because they are collecting data on people that can later be hacked and gotten by rival nations, or because they're starting wars with other nations who knows for what selfish reasons, without the people knowing anything about it. We should have a big debate about it, yet no one seems to be starting it.