>show ANY evidence that we are more safe or more free from terrorism by surrounding our rights to privacy
Wasn't FBI surveillance a thing during the Boston bombing? Since 9/11 have any attacks been prevented? If surveillance was a tool to prevent these attacks, why wasn't the surveillance authority (FBI) held directly responsible for the attacks?
Anyone who would advocate surveillance would first need to be criminally prosecuted for the Boston bombing because at the time they had the information and ignored it. With-holding information from the law about crime or potential crimes is illegal.
Surveillance was used, however, to identify and track the Boston Bombers, leading to death and capture, and parallel construction was used to create an unstoppable court case, leading to imprisonment and death sentencing.
But you are right - these tools are not used merely to detect and stop terrorist activity. It is also used to track and stop ideas, to give leads and to give extremely powerful intelligence to the FBI, CIA, DIA, NCTC, etc whenever it is needed for some purpose. To those in power these capabilities are extremely powerful.
The existence of these powers does not mean that they will be abused on a systematic level - though of course the potential is always there. One danger is that America's fight to remain relevant in a world that may be moving past it, it may turn ever more Fascistic. In this case, these are powers that would be extremely dangerous for the government to have.
But take a step back to think about this. As citizens we are worried about the use of these capabilities to thwart the public. They are so powerful and so complete that we fear being subjects of its application - viscerally.
To the extent that the good will and checks and balances have worked to keep the brunt of these capabilities aimed outside US borders there are people who do fear, and deserve to fear, the wrath of the US government - even those who might otherwise be innocents, bystanders, or casualties of the struggle for power.
My heart goes out to these people stuck in the middle and it beats faster at the thought of being one myself.
"Surveillance", if you count confiscated video footage from the crime scenes, may have been used to identify, but not to track.
Tamerlan died in a shootout after a police officer in Watertown noticed the stolen SUV and called it in. [edit: note there was some tracking of the hijacked SUV due to the owner's cooperation, but that's targeted tracking with cooperation, and not of the brothers themselves]
Tsarnaev was apprehended after an ordinary citizen noticed someone hiding on his boat and called it in.
The massive manhunt, whatever the intelligence apparatus contributed, the shutting down of Boston and suburbs... all accomplished pretty much nothing, other than conditioning people to get used to martial law, and an excuse to point guns at people[1] to cow them into submission.
And what evidence at trial was unlikely to have been available except by parallel construction? The defense strategy was to admit the acts but argue he was brainwashed by his brother and shouldn't receive a death sentence.
The hijacked ML350 was tracked, allegedly, but not with broad surveillance powers. They were able to track it after the driver escaped, because he cooperated, had left his iphone in the vehicle, and the vehicle had satellite navigation.
Actually, I like this strategy and it probably works. It's a good strategy against pirated software too. If 90% of terrorist suppliers are really cia entrappers, terrorists are going to have a hard time coordinating anything that requires resources beyond 1 person. Entrapment requires lying. And if you have ready decided to lie to your own people, may as well use its full evil power on the adversary.
If you're justifying your program by spending its resources trying to goad people with mental handicaps and other lowest common denominator people into committing terrorism, what have you accomplished?
Any organization with a degree of security, one a nation would consider an adversary, is aware of the dangers agents pose with infiltration.
Lots of attacks have been claimed to have been prevented, though in many cases when the details for several of them came out they were attacks that may have been discussed but weren't particularly likely to have been executed, and/or plots that were largely driven by government agents.
Wasn't FBI surveillance a thing during the Boston bombing? Since 9/11 have any attacks been prevented? If surveillance was a tool to prevent these attacks, why wasn't the surveillance authority (FBI) held directly responsible for the attacks?
Anyone who would advocate surveillance would first need to be criminally prosecuted for the Boston bombing because at the time they had the information and ignored it. With-holding information from the law about crime or potential crimes is illegal.