These kinds of cold shoulders are the language of diplomacy and power. In some small abstract way, the US's ability to defend itself has been reduced by this action-- power has been reduced. The power players in the government will take note of this, and ultimately tiny intangible reductions will be unsustainable and policy will have to change.
While I don't disagree that it is a strong political move, and an appropriate one, I have seen no proof that any of the NSA's operations have made the USA materially safer.
this game is not about being safer (that's what the USA government sells to their citizens), it's about political and industrial espionage, and building a database of dissenters for the future.
I agree, but I like to think about these things in the terms the government does, which includes a lot of paranoid fear produced by false and frequently cynically malicious assumptions.
Like I said, the difference in actual security here is abstract, difficult to quantify, and potentially nothing practically speaking.
> there hasn't been a large scale terrorist attack in north america in 13 1/2 years -there is no evidence that NSA is doing anything to protect America!
0 in 13.5 years is not (especially considering that "large scale terrorist attacks" can only occur in integer units) substantially below the long-run historical average.
So, yeah, that, in and of itself, is not really any kind of evidence of any success of any changed policy since the last attack.
Here's the problem with the Boston Marathon attack; it was planned and conducted by US citizens in the USA without any planning with any foreigners.
When someone says "the NSA couldn't even stop the Boston Marathon bombing", they are implying that the NSA SHOULD have been able to. But for the NSA to be able to stop it, they would have to be collecting data on US citizens inside the USA.
You can't have it both ways. You can't blast the NSA for not being able to stop Boston but then also be against them doing domestic collection. The fact that they couldn't stop Boston shows that they weren't spying on Americans (even though one was on watchlists).
These kinds of cold shoulders are the language of diplomacy and power. In some small abstract way, the US's ability to defend itself has been reduced by this action-- power has been reduced. The power players in the government will take note of this, and ultimately tiny intangible reductions will be unsustainable and policy will have to change.