It’s not really fair to use the front page to call people out, but there’s really no other venue for ending arguments like this:

Inside the Puzzle Palace: A Reason interview with NSA whistleblower Russell Tice:

We’re finding out that NSA conducted surveillance on U.S. citizens. And FISA could have been used but wasn’t, was sidestepped. No one even made the attempt to see if they had a problem they could have fixed through FISA.
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As a signals intelligence officer, kids who go right out of college and work for the NSA, this is drilled into you, especially when you’re young: You will not do this. This is number one of the NSA’s Ten Commandments: You will not spy on Americans. Even after you’ve had all those introductory briefings when you’re a new employee, for the rest of your career, at least twice a year they call you in for a briefing, and this is always covered. “You will not do this,” they shake their fingers at you. “If you do this you can be thrown in jail.” And all of a sudden you find out the people who’ve been shaking their fingers are doing what they’re telling you is against the law and coming out with some cockeyed nonsense excuses for why everything’s OK. It’s sort of like having your parents drill it into you not to smoke cigarettes or do drugs or whatever, and then after you’re a good little boy coming home from school at 15 and finding your parents out on the balcony doing all that.

Fear rules the day right now. For the most part, people know, NSA employees know, that this is wrong, that this is illegal. In many cases they feel betrayed by their own leadership…
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When it comes to high crimes and misdemeanors, knowingly and willingly doing this and then being arrogant about it and saying we’re going to continue doing it—I would certainly think falls into that category of high crimes.

Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends:

In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.
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“We’d chase a number, find it’s a schoolteacher with no indication they’ve ever been involved in international terrorism – case closed,” said one former F.B.I. official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. “After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration.”