WASHINGTON — Is all this NSA secrecy necessary?
In the aftermath of the revelations that the National Security Agency is sweeping up vast amounts of telephone and Internet records, Google and Facebook are calling for the government to reveal more about how they operate secret surveillance programs.
The call by the tech giants for less secrecy is spurring a broader debate about whether the intelligence community is remaining unnecessarily opaque about some of its operations.
Former government intelligence officials and experts are divided on whether keeping such programs cloaked in secrecy is vital to their effectiveness, and whether the NSA revelations have undermined the effectiveness of those programs in the future.
"I think there are legitimate issues to be raised about how much more leg can be shown ... to facilitate public debate and a debate in Congress," said Paul Pillar, a former chief counterterrorism analyst for the CIA. "But the main risk and damage that's been caused in these leaks is in hurting the cooperation and confidence between private sector companies that are involved and the government agencies."
Citing classified documents leaked by former NSA contract employee Edward Snowden, The Washington Post and Guardian newspapers reported last week that the FBI and NSA had access to data of major U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs.
Under growing criticism from users, Google and Facebook on Tuesday asked the Justice Department to allow them to disclose information about national-security requests for data in its transparency report.
Critics of secrecy say would-be terrorists certainly already know what's going on, leaving little reason to keep Americans totally in the dark about what sort of information it's collecting.
By all indications, the top terrorist minds of this generation — Osama bin Laden and Anwar Awlaki — were fully aware that U.S. intelligence officials were closely monitoring their telephone and internet activity. Bin Laden went into a virtual electronic shutdown after escaping U.S. forces during the battle of Tora Bora in late 2001. And the Yemen-based terrorist and Internet provocateur Awlaki went to great lengths at the end of his life to obscure his digital footprint.


"I'm not sure what kind of advantage an adversary gets when we say, 'Hey, we're collecting a lot of phone and e-mail records,' " said Philip Mudd, a former FBI and CIA counterterrorism official.
But some intelligence analysts and government officials say keeping such programs cloaked in secrecy is vital to their effectiveness. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said recent disclosures about the NSA phone and e-mail operations damaged national security, without providing specifics. And on Wednesday, NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander said that the surveillance programs had helped thwart "dozens" of terrorist attacks.
"Our ability to discuss these activities is limited by our need to protect intelligence sources and methods," Clapper said. "Disclosing information about the specific methods the government uses to collect communications can obviously give our enemies a 'playbook' of how to avoid detection."
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that the Internet surveillance program, known as PRISM, was helpful in catching Afghan-American Najibullah Zazi, who pleaded guilty in the 2009 plot to bomb the New York City subway, saying he had been recruited by al-Qaeda in Pakistan.
The break in that case came, according to court documents and testimony, when Zazi e-mailed a Yahoo address seeking help with his bomb recipe. British authorities had been monitoring that address.
"It's the rogue actor, the random guy like the New York subway bomber, that is now going to act differently," said James Lewis, director of the technology and public policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The non-professional will now be more cautious about how he acts."
Susan Landau, author of Surveillance or Security?:The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technology, counters that government has the right to protect algorithms, the specific mathematical formulas the NSA uses to process and analyze the data. But the public is entitled to know the kinds of data collected and how its use can be restricted to prevent abuse of law-abiding citizens, she said.
"We really need to discuss how this meta-data should be handled under the law," Landau said. "What data is collected and what the minimization rules are for that data."
In the recent past, Congress has shown little appetite for making public even the general outlines of the government's surveillance programs. Last year, three disclosure proposals were offered by Democratic Reps. Bobby Scott of Virginia, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, but were defeated by the House Judiciary Committee.
History has shown that clandestine snooping techniques can be revealed without undermining the ability of the intelligence community to continue to use the programs, said U.S. intelligence historian Matthew Aid.
For example, In 1971, journalist Jack Anderson revealed that hidden in the U.S. embassy in Moscow was a radiotelephone interceptor that was listening in on calls by the Kremlin leadership. Anderson was immediately condemned by the U.S. government for the disclosure of the surveillance program, code-named Gamma Guppy.
Despite the fact that Gamma Guppy had been compromised, the Soviet leaders continued to use this insecure form of communication. And the Gamma Guppy intelligence continued to roll in, said Aid, who wrote about the episode in his book The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency.
In fact, nearly a year after the revelation, intelligence officers learned vital information through the surveillance project that played a crucial part in how the Nixon administration negotiated with the Soviet Union on the SALT Treaty.
It wasn't until 1973 that the Soviets began installing jamming equipment around the U.S. embassy to try to prevent the Americans from intercepting Kremlin calls.
"If history teaches us anything," Aid said, "the immediate claims by senior intelligence officers that severe and irremediable damage to the U.S. intelligence community are usually overstated."