Bruce Schneier on the state of public trust.

And, while you’re at it, take in this Ars Technica article where they ask him how HE would run the NSA. It’s illuminating:

“There’s a fundamental problem in that the issues are not with the NSA but with oversight,” he told Ars. “[There’s no way to] counterbalance the way [the NSA] looks at the world. So when the NSA says we want to get information on every American’s phone call, no one is saying: ‘you can’t do that.’ Without that, you have an agency that’s gone rogue because there is no accountability, because there is nothing checking their power.”

The way Schneier sees it, in an attempt to keep the operational details of the targets secret, the NSA (and presumably other intelligence agencies, too) has also claimed that it also needs to keep secret the legal justification for what it’s doing. “That’s bullshit,” Schneier says.

The famed computer scientist wants to apply traditionally open and public scrutiny to how the NSA operates.

“How much does this stuff cost and does it do any good?” he said. “And if they can’t tell us that, they don’t get approved. Let’s say the NSA costs $100 million annually and that an FBI agent is $100,000 a year. Is this worth 1,000 FBI agents? Or half and half? Nowhere will you find that analysis.”

For the record: the size of the NSA’s budget is officially classified as secret, but estimates put it at at least $8 to $10 billion annually—but his point stands. It’s nearly impossible to judge the effectiveness of federal spending of an unknown sum, whose tactics, legal justifications, and most importantly, outcomes, are completely hidden from the public.