I'm no fan of the recent fourth amendment violations, but the NSA's response is actually reasonable here given its proper mission. Re-read this section, but imagine the requester was asking for information on whether the NSA had collected information about his communications and movements during his recent trip to China:

    Any positive or negative response on a request-by-request basis
    would allow our adversaries [China] to accumulate information
    and draw conclusions about NSA's technical capabilities, sources,
    and methods.  Our adversaries are likely to evaluate all public
    responses related to these programs.  Were we to provide positive
    or negative responses to requests such as yours, our adversaries'
    compilation of the information provided would reasonably be expected
    to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.

This is completely accurate. If the NSA actually responded to these requests, it would be trivial for an adversary (e.g. China) to probe the extent and nature of the information the NSA collects, just by having their agents regularly file FOIA requests.

My main problem with these programs is the lack of oversight and any kind of public controls to prevent abuse by bad actors. I don't mind when judges issue warrants to gather private information; that's oversight, with a level of public visibility eventually involved. Warrants are accounted for right there in the fourth amendment.

But these programs are known, thanks to Edward Snowden, to have shoddy controls over individual analyst access to the information. That alone reveals an institutional bias inside the NSA against respecting citizens' privacy; if they treated it as a really big deal then Snowden wouldn't have been able to gain access to individual information as he has claimed. Consequently I have little faith that justice would be served on analysts or departments who use the information for their own purposes, and that's the core problem for me.

We know the FBI treated Martin Luther King as a potential terrorist. If the NSA's information had been available to them, why wouldn't they have asked for it, formally or otherwise, if there were no negative consequences?

What does that mean for political activism given today's more tightly integrated Department of Homeland Security?