> I am a pacifist, I'd much prefer that we wound down this (and most other) military activity
How are we to wind it down, or even know that we want to wind it down, if we don't know what it does? The reaction to all of this over-the-top foreign spying stuff is as loud as it is precisely because most people were not aware of its extent, regardless of the stated mission of the NSA. The NSA grew so large and powerful because its projects were secret and thus largely shielded from public review. In that light, the secrecy is a lot more than an operational detail; it's a deception directed at the American people in order to pursue unpopular security policy. Note, for example, that even the NSA's budget is classified. They've built something very big, and they were only allowed to do it by keeping it in the dark.
To put that another way, if it really is merely the NSA's stated mission and revealing its secrets is mere sabotage, why is it scandalous that they tapped Angela Merkel's phone? Why is it outrageous that they're spying on Google's intra-datacenter communications? Why is tracking the world's cell phone locations an embarrassing thing to have done? Because if we'd been asked, we wouldn't have let them do it. But we weren't asked, because secrets.
Thus, I think that revealing the extent of NSA spying, including all of the foreign stuff, falls in this bucket:
> Revealing that an entity is doing things it should not be doing so the correct oversight can be put in place.
In my view, our government doesn't have a fundamental right to secrecy. We provisionally granted it the privilege of keeping some things secret from us (remember, we're The People) because we felt it was in a good position to make the tradeoffs required there. It has systematically abused that privilege and now it's lost its claim to it.