Ha, I haven't thought about Binney in a while. Well he certainly focused on the issue of the surveillance apparatus failing to perform a useful function to US citizens, unfortunately Binney's narrative had relatively few datapoints (which some would dismiss as an aberration) - the government therefor had a wide selection of acceptable responses. So I draw mainly from Snowden, due to the government's chosen method of damage mitigation. When you consider their potential alternatives, and the likely reasons for their rejection, it provides a peek into the black box:

Given the fact that their sources and methods had just been burned, and they had no hope of discrediting the leaks, the most logical path would have been to declassify operation success - this was actually the only time that they'd have realistically been able to do something like that. This would have immediately villainized Snowden, preemptively defused all future leaks, shielded politicians, and changed the narrative. They didn't do this, and the list of potential reasons why is very short - at the top of the list: they had no operation successes (or a comically small quantity) that the US public would recognize as such.

I've also worked as an analyst in Corporate America (specifically related fraud and low probability/high cost events), so I'm intimately familiar with the utility of an untargeted survey of massive and rapidly expanding datasets (in both datapoints and dimensionality).

> What our IC was doing is nothing compared...

The whataboutism isn't a long term winning strategy. Even if one were to reduce all geopolitical activity to the concept of amoral power struggle, that does not factor in how we are engaged not in a singular contest - but a series of games on an unknown timescale.

> I find Snowden and Greenwald leaking such a document to be hugely offensive and anti-American.

Obviously I disagree. Here is the moral of the story, and what many of us felt vindicated in its undeniable revelation: given the capability and disposition - the US Government will do whatever it wants. The larger body of leaks demonstrated capability, the link you just read demonstrated a single example of disposition... interestingly enough, the Department of state uses a similar metric for the designation of terrorist organizations.

> I believe in the American way and disagree that we should not have an offensive cyber strategy as well...

I'm fine with that, but it should be reduced by an order of magnitude or two. It isn't presently doing us any good, and it represents a very realistic potential threat for abuse.

> Offensive biological strategy is something different, not seeing the parallel.

Both programs have the same asymmetry for offense and defense. They also share the same risk that your own advancement in offense will be used against your own interests by a much less capable adversary. Had the CIA paid attention to this, they'd not have lost control of their 0-day rootkits that got used by criminals (and potentially by adversarial states) against US interests.

> As for your insights about Iraq I’ll ask around.

Ask about the NRO and the FBI, they're the only ones I can think of that actually provided a benefit. The CIA was a net negative. The NSA did nothing, any capability they could have brought was already organic to the deployed element (and has been since WWII).