Just a for instance, but I think the patriot act passed the senate 99 to 1.
And we got rid of that one guy who voted against, and we replaced him with a more "law and order" type guy.
So you gotta figure almost every American has at least had opportunities to vote for their senators. (We can agree that not everyone did, but the opportunities were there.) And those votes resulted in a senate where something like the patriot act could pass without more than a single vote against it.
This is why the terrorists have won on 9/11. They wanted to damage the US, erode its institutions, make it weaker and less attractive in the eyes of people, and they achieved it. Not through killing people, of course, but through the continued reaction of those who stayed alive. This makes me sad.
Also, there was plenty of talk about who and where, yet close to zero discussion as to why. Why is important. The truth is, more than once, UBL warned "Get out of our neighborhood." The USA ignored those requests. That doesn't justify the attacks, but it certainly creates a case of "I'm surprised you're surprised." Yet the (American) public never got the true clear story.
Instead, someone cooked up a like about WMD's, a sovereign nation was invaded in that same area, and in the end over 100,000 __civilians__ were killed. Does that solve why, or re-enforce? And still no transparency?
I personally blame Hoover for the state of things, but as a whole, our government is used to control, and complete control relies on complete information. If something is missed because it fell between the cracks in the IC's sampling rate, the executives publicly blame the IC for not informing them, which ends with demands for a higher sampling rate. Look deeply into the causes of our most recent invasion of Iraq, and you'll see this pattern pretty clearly.
The reason Intel dragnets exist is that politicians always feel compelled to do SOMETHING after a domestic crisis, even if they know the ensuing compromise of civil liberties will accomplish nothing toward preventing the same crisis from recurring. But voters who don't pay attention (and don't really care) are appeased by bold reaction (and the thought that bad guys can't keep secrets from US). A symbolic knee-jerk usually violent reaction all they really wanted (like invading Iraq).
Frankly, after 75 years of 99% fruitless and increasingly expensive machinations by the OSS and CIA and NSA, all of us who are paying attention know know damn well that US Intel agencies really don't accomplish much that's useful to peacetime national security. That is, unless Intel's unblinking eye is turned toward targets who are of personal interest, domestically like MLK or PETA, or internationally like Saddam Hussein or Manuel Noriega. Then politicians unconcerned with due process like Nixon and Cheney can freely use that intel to attack their personal "enemies of the state".
30 years after the end of the cold war, THAT's why domestic Intel agencies continue to exist. All of the US military services have their own Intel agencies for use during war. They don't need the CIA or NSA. Only Presidents do. And IMHO, for all the wrong reasons.
Just because it's not in the headlines doesn't mean they didn't do anything. It's just that if the successfully stopped a terrorist attack for example, you wouldn't hear about it, both because it's no longer big news (nothing happened), and because those agencies would want to prevent the lose of assets as much as they can, so they wouldn't publish the information either.
I think the CIA and NSA have probably done a lot for the safety of America and US citizens (especially in times of peace). However (based on no evidence, just a hunch) I think that most of those cases, they just needed the basic tools already in their disposal (like monitoring suspects based on actual evidence and following a court order approval), and that the extreme means they use don't have a big impact when it comes to the security of lives (US or global).