Unkind people might suggest that the real reason these programs were kept secret actually stems from the administration’s fear that public awareness of their “modest encroachments” on privacy would make further efforts to encroach more difficult. Thus, Reuters notes that a former Air Force secretary ominously warns that a “growing unease about domestic
surveillance could have a chilling effect on proposed cyber legislation that calls for greater information-sharing between government and industry.” And it also notes that, after the revelations, more lawmakers signed on to legislation that would strengthen the privacy protections in the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
Perhaps, then, the programs were kept secret not so much to protect people from terrorism, but to protect the government from the annoying and inconvenient public and Congressional outcry that, as it happens, constitutes the untidy stuff of democracy."
http://politicalscience.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller/NSAshane3.pdf
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