The Obama regime, trying to defend massive surveillance, makes bogus claims that this surveillance prevented one terrorist plot and led to conviction of an accomplice to another.

Even supposing massive surveillance prevented a real attack once in a while, that is small potatoes compared with the harm of trashing everyone's privacy, and the even greater harm of catching leakers and thus concealing or facilitating the government's enormous crimes. Those crimes dwarf the crimes of non-state-supported terrorists.