The NSA admits that none of their surveillance ever prevented a terrorist attack.

The latest bunch of Snowden docs reveal that "since the earliest days" of the NSA's program of bulk phone-record collection, it broke the law enthusiastically and repeatedly. When confronted by a judge in the secret FISA Court -- the only practical oversight for NSA spying -- the NSA told the judge that the reason they were breaking the law is that they'd designed a system so compartmentalized and complex that no one at the NSA actually understood how it worked, leading to the violations of the law.