Políticos ou administradores públicos, confrontados com a necessidade de tomar decisões, sem conhecimentos científicos e técnicos, ficam perplexos face às divergências dos técnicos. Não se apercebem de que, nestes casos, o que conta não é a “perfeição técnica” dos projetos. O que conta é a desejabilidade ou não dos alvos.

A bomba atômica é uma técnica perfeitíssima, mas profundamente indesejável. As decisões, portanto, não devem basear-se em aspectos técnicos, mas sim em preceitos básicos de sabedoria. A técnica entra depois de escolhidos os alvos.

[Top-secret NSA's] documents [... make] clear that the agency collects and analyzes significant amounts of data from US communications systems in the course of monitoring foreign targets: [...] the NSA is able to direct [75%] of the internet traffic it intercepts from its collection points into its own repositories. [...] -- After the EvilOlive [program] deployment, traffic has literally doubled.

One end of the communications collected are inside the United States, [... but] a substantial portion of the internet metadata still collected and analyzed by the NSA comes from allied governments, including its British counterpart, GCHQ: An SSO entry dated September 21, 2012, announced that Transient Thurible, a new Government Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ) managed XKeyScore (XKS) Deep Dive was declared operational. The entry states that GCHQ modified an existing program so the NSA could benefit from what GCHQ harvested: Transient Thurible metadata [has been] flowing into NSA repositories since 13 August 2012, the entry states.

In the mid-1970s, the US Senate formed the Select Intelligence Committee to investigate reports of the widespread domestic surveillance abuses that had emerged in the wake of the Nixon scandals. The Committee was chaired by 4-term Idaho Democratic Sen. Frank Church who was, among other things, a former military intelligence officer and one of the Senate's earliest opponents of the Vietnam War, as well as a former Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Even among US Senators, virtually nothing was known at the time about the National Security Agency. The Beltway joke was that "NSA" stood for "no such agency". Upon completing his investigation, Church was so shocked to learn what he had discovered - the massive and awesome spying capabilities constructed by the US government with no transparency or accountability - that he issued the following warning, as reported by the New York Times, using language strikingly stark for such a mainstream US politician when speaking about his own government:

That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide.

He added that if a dictator ever took over, the NSA could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.