I tried to make clear: Big gumment brings two problems. First, it wastes money. That's the smaller problem but still
quite significant (we need to get our economy going, and wasting money hurts). Second, big gumment is a real threat to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" and nearly
everything we want.

But you want to emphasize "effective" gumment. Okay.
So did I: I said that we should get the NSA being
"safe and effective" for our country. "Safe" mostly
means that the NSA doesn't trash our Constitution and
ruin the US, and "effective" means what you want, catch
the bad guys.

Now we come to the hard part: Catching the bad guys.
In the case of Boston, as I pointed out, Russia told
us. Russia was correct. So, really, it's getting
clear: The NSA's ideas of all that 'big data'
is not very effective. I know; I know; some of the
Senators will say that in the secret hearings the
NSA, FBI, DHS, CIA, etc. guys explain all the bad
guys they stopped, bad guys that never made the
news. Given Boston, I don't believe it! What I
believe is that they go after some guy in the second
grade in the lunch room who takes the bread from
his sandwich, cuts it out to like like a gun,
shows it around his lunch table, and the big
gumment guys shut down the school. Or they go
after Aaron Swartz. They are just not competent.
So, they are not effective.

"Big" is always a threat: Ike warned about the
military-industrial complex, and the bigness is
much of the positive feedback loop that has it
grow.

Sure, we'd both like more competence. Remember
9/11? Or, remember one of the core reasons? Right:
Some semi-, pseudo-, quasi-bright guy had one of
his better ideas: If a terrorist tries to take
over an airplane in mid-flight, then don't resist and,
instead, let him have it. Presto: Open, engraved
invitation to 9/11. Bet you can't do that now.
Even if managed to get on an airplane with
various weapons, bet couldn't take over the
plane and fly it into a big building. So,
need the TSA, DHS, and NSA for that? Nope:
Just change the silly rule that says give
an airplane to any terrorist who asks.

Competence is more difficult. I'm all
for more in competence. But big and
competent don't go well together.

Look, it's not worth trashing our Constitution,
setting up an organization that could take
us to Hitler, and wasting the big bucks
to set up an NSA that could
catch another Boston bomber, even if such
an organization could catch another bomber,
which likely they can't. Heck, again, the
Russians told us about those two
loser, wacko nutjobs, which is much better
info than we could have hoped for from
the NSA, and still we did nothing.

Big gumment in England? Go after a guy
because of something about pictures of
nude children on his computer that turned
out to be his grandchildren playing with
water in the yard.

Big gumment in the US? Have some Department
of Natural Resources (DNR) go after a couple
with several cats, several dogs, and
a five year old deer they had raised from
a fawn whose mother had just been killed
in an auto accident, really, a minute
or so before the fawn was born. So the
DNR has in their imagination that
deer, with their hoofs, can hurt people.
Of course, in this case, the deer has been
just fine, in the house, with several dogs
and cats, for five years, not even hurting
the furniture. Big gumment.

And we have the Aaron Swartz case, gumment
going wacko over some PDF files readily available to everyone
at MIT for free and in paper form
in nearly every research library in the world
for the cost of photocopying. Big gumment.

We saw in the IRS case big gumment
abusing its powers. Well, the NSA data would
be an engraved invitation to more
such abuses -- shakedowns, blackmail,
payoffs, kickbacks, etc.

In reality, the more effective gumment you
want will have to be smaller gumment.

There's a recent example with the F-35. Supposedly
part of the problem with that program is that
someone wants to change the specifications
on some screw, so they have a meeting all day
with everyone affected, 600 people, that is
a representative from each of all the possibly affected
subcontractors or some such. The solution?
The Lockheed Skunk Works deliberately kept
small enough to keep up communications and
keep down the huge meetings.

For the NSA phone data, that sounds like the
old project Total Information Awareness or
some such. There has been a little company
on a few floors of a not very attractive
office building on the space of a shopping
mall in a suburb of Boston. Once I went
for an interview. I used to do 'artificial
intelligence', i.e., 'expert systems', and
they were big on that, likely from what
some people at DARPA are still dreaming
about. So, they wanted to get data on
phone calls, maybe e-mail messages,
postcards, whatever, with data on
from, to, and date, and then build a
big directed graph with an arc for
each communication and a node for
each person sending or receiving.
Then they wanted to do some analysis
of the graph, look for 'cliques' or
some such. While they explained, I tried
to stay awake, but being really interested
was asking too much. BS. Total BS.
But it looks like the graph people
have taken over the NSA. All the
brighter people in Russia are likely
doing a ROFL. I'm not laughing:
It's expensive, dumb, and dangerous.
Just cut it back.