What the NSA Does With the Data It Isn't Allowed to Keep - Conor Friedersdorf - The Atlantic: Why are these particular details highly classified state secrets? It's an abuse of the system -- a scandal in itself. What the NSA does with information it collects but isn't allowed to have isn't something that needs to be decided secretly and kept secret by self-interested national-security bureaucrats.
The information doesn't threaten national security at all. It's an appropriate subject of public scrutiny and debate. To take just one example, should the NSA get to keep "information on criminal activity" unrelated to terrorism? I can see the arguments for and against. But it makes no sense to suggest that knowing the rule currently used or debating it publicly threatens national security. And all sorts of other things that ought to be publicly debated have been and remain classified too, so the NSA can do as it pleases. It would still be secret if not for Snowden, who, whatever else you think of him, may well have given up his freedom to tell us.