So when they tell you there's a terrorism threat, should you believe them?

As early as 2007, leaked reports from fusion centers showed serious problems with their intelligence gathering. 

Instead of looking for terrorist threats, fusion centers were monitoring lawful political and religious activity. That year, the Virginia Fusion Center described a Muslim get-out–the-vote campaign as “subversive.” In 2009, the North Central Texas Fusion Center identified lobbying by Muslim groups as a possible threat.

The DHS dismissed these as isolated episodes, but the two-year Senate investigation found that such tactics were hardly rare. It concluded that fusion centers routinely produce “irrelevant, useless or inappropriate” intelligence that endangers civil liberties. 

None of their information has disrupted a single terrorist plot. ...Roll Call

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The Department of Homeland Security has flexed similar muscle at the border, where it asserts the power to search and copy information from a traveler’s laptop, camera, smartphone, or tablet with no suspicion of criminal wrongdoing. ...

... The combination of the federal government’s existing powers and expanded electronic surveillance will undermine privacy while offering little in the way of terrorism prevention. The indiscriminate collection of information is sometimes justified by the need to “connect the dots,” a phrase often used to describe sifting through vast government databases to look for patterns suggestive of terrorist or other criminal activity. While this type of data mining works well when used by credit card companies to identify purchasing patterns, experts agree that it is an unsuitable tool for terrorism prediction. Terror attacks are rare and disparate, unlike credit card purchases, and therefore do not offer reliable patterns to mine. ...Rachel Levinson-Waldman,Counsel to the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program

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... The effect of secrecy on democracy isn't abstract. The consequences of secret law and policy are not something we're risking, or that we might suffer at some time in the indeterminate future.

Secrecy is already corroding our democracy.

It's impossible to see at the time, and obvious in hindsight, when the truth outs.

In 2011, the debate surrounding the re-authorization of a major piece of domestic legislation was, indisputably, a sham. Legislators were misled. Careful, informed commentators contributing arguments and analysis in the press unwittingly misled readers with content that lacked crucial context. Hard news articles were just as useless for formulating an informed opinion.

Even those elected representatives informed about the full extent of government surveillance were deprived of normal legislative practices, like floor debate, letters and phone calls from constituents, input from experts outside government, and public opinion polls, that properly factor into their typical deliberation and voting decisions. And Americans were deprived of the right to know what their representatives really approved, meaningfully robbing them of the ability to cast a meaningful vote in the Congressional races of the 2012 cycle, a key check and balance.

Jay Rosen theorizes that some defenders of secret programs like the ones the NSA ran have repealed "the concept of an informed public," but repressed their decision "to take such a drastic step, because it's too much to face." And it's easy to see why it is too much for them to face. They've embraced a mindset that is incompatible with and capable of destroying American democracy. They might as well insist that they have to destroy the country to save it from terrorism. However well-intentioned, their mindset poses a bigger threat to America democracy than Al Qaeda. Luckily, Americans are gradually beginning to awaken to their subterfuge and radicalism. ...Conor Friedersdorf,TheAtlantic