Are we getting any benefit from the NSA spying on us?

Most of our privacy is gone. We have traded out privacy for benefits from Google, Facebook, and Twitter. What we haven't done is give our government the authority to observe us like lab specimens. We must be aware of what the government is doing before we can decide whether they have gone too far.

One of the worst problems, beside the government hiding from us, is that we are getting lousy return on investment from the information that the government is stealing from us. We are giving up all our privacy to the government and we have nothing to show for it.

CNN reports: "On Thursday, Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, Democrats who both serve on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and have access to the nation's most sensitive secrets, released a statement contradicting [the] assertion [that the NSA's surveillance programs have stopped many terrorist attacks]. "Gen. Alexander's testimony yesterday suggested that the NSA's bulk phone records collection program helped thwart 'dozens' of terrorist attacks, but all of the plots that he mentioned appear to have been identified using other collection methods," the two senators said."

For giving up all our privacy we should have a government that catches everything that could threaten us in the entire world. What it looks like, however, is that we could trade the entire NSA program for a few friendly police officers and have just as effective of an outcome.