With their charter (scope of their power), and with their budget, and with their actual (not nominal) level of accountability? Sincerely, no, I don't think so, and I want to make sure you know that I'm taking your question seriously. It's a good one, and a difficult one.
This is debatable, of course, but in my view secret services ("intelligence agencies") and secret police (the FBI) are a deal with the devil for societies in general: in the long run much, much more harmful and costly than beneficial. You're taking human beings -- brutally fallible and power-mad like we all have the capacity to be -- and telling them "here, you have a special hall pass to cheat, lie, steal, and kill, but promise to only do it to those guys over there, okay?" Can we really be shocked when, a few years down the line, they forget everything after "but"? Note, too, that this hall pass is both legal and moral, couched as it is in the language of patriotism ("national security"): it's wrong to kill, but this is for your country, so you're good. (Incidentally, things like this really show that Ian Fleming was a pretty good satirist - "license to kill" is much more macabre and darkly funny when you realize that it's real.)
It may sound naive or even callous to say that nothing the NSA does is or can be legitimate - yes, al qaeda could kill Americans if the NSA doesn't spy on them or if the CIA doesn't lob a Hellfire missile at their daughter's birthday party. But we citizens make these kinds of decisions all the time, explicitly or implicitly.
Take automobiles as an example, or the legal status of alcohol - we've decided that we're okay with hundreds of thousands of people dying every decade in return for using those things. That's on all our heads, as I see it. I'm not certain, but I'd put money that there's no threat the NSA looks out for that, absent the NSA, could wreak as much havoc on the US as car crashes and whiskey (and that's not even counting the interaction of cars and whiskey, heh). And if there was, it'd probably be attributable in whole or in part to how the US has behaved out there beyond our shores. In fact I'm shocked sometimes that the rest of the planet hasn't been more out for our blood given what we did in the 2nd half of the 20th century alone. This isn't to be a mouth-foaming hater, by the way - I love this country very much. But a lot of ugly shit goes down on our dime, and in our names.
This is debatable, of course, but in my view secret services ("intelligence agencies") and secret police (the FBI) are a deal with the devil for societies in general: in the long run much, much more harmful and costly than beneficial. You're taking human beings -- brutally fallible and power-mad like we all have the capacity to be -- and telling them "here, you have a special hall pass to cheat, lie, steal, and kill, but promise to only do it to those guys over there, okay?" Can we really be shocked when, a few years down the line, they forget everything after "but"? Note, too, that this hall pass is both legal and moral, couched as it is in the language of patriotism ("national security"): it's wrong to kill, but this is for your country, so you're good. (Incidentally, things like this really show that Ian Fleming was a pretty good satirist - "license to kill" is much more macabre and darkly funny when you realize that it's real.)
It may sound naive or even callous to say that nothing the NSA does is or can be legitimate - yes, al qaeda could kill Americans if the NSA doesn't spy on them or if the CIA doesn't lob a Hellfire missile at their daughter's birthday party. But we citizens make these kinds of decisions all the time, explicitly or implicitly.
Take automobiles as an example, or the legal status of alcohol - we've decided that we're okay with hundreds of thousands of people dying every decade in return for using those things. That's on all our heads, as I see it. I'm not certain, but I'd put money that there's no threat the NSA looks out for that, absent the NSA, could wreak as much havoc on the US as car crashes and whiskey (and that's not even counting the interaction of cars and whiskey, heh). And if there was, it'd probably be attributable in whole or in part to how the US has behaved out there beyond our shores. In fact I'm shocked sometimes that the rest of the planet hasn't been more out for our blood given what we did in the 2nd half of the 20th century alone. This isn't to be a mouth-foaming hater, by the way - I love this country very much. But a lot of ugly shit goes down on our dime, and in our names.