We know with 100% absolute certainty that the wiretapping industry – NSA, GCHQ, FRA, etc – has stopped a total of exactly zero terror plots.

We know with 100% absolute certainty that the wiretapping industry – NSA, GCHQ, FRA, etc – has stopped a total of exactly zero terror plots. We can be certain of this fact, as there have been no trials and no convictions of planning widespread destruction. Planning such a crime is almost as serious a crime as executing it, and while there can be secret evidence in some uncivilized countries, the courts and trials themselves are not secret.

In an attempt to justify their existence, the NSA, the GCHQ, the FRA, and other similar governmental agencies in the wiretapping industry tend to say that their existence and actually-criminal operations are justified by the fact that they “foil terror plots” – a textbook example of how the ends justify the means, and of the necessity of upholding the law by systematically breaking it.
We have heard this justification from the NSA, the GCHQ, and the FRA alike, just like from their brethren. However, we know for a certainty that they are lying.
If an act of terror was being planned in some stage sufficienty advanced to talk of it in terms of a “terror plan”, then such planning and preparation is itself a crime. In Sweden, the principal crime is “causing devastation with a hazard to the public” (allmänfarlig ödeläggelse), and that is a crime that carries a prison sentence in the double digits or even life in prison. Planning and preparing for such a crime (“förberedelsebrott”) carries practically as high a sentence as carrying it out.
So if such a planning had actually been discovered, it would be in the courts, and somebody would be on trial for it. That sequence of events is absolutely inescapable. We don’t have secret courts (even if some uncivilized countries insist of having secret evidence); the trials and charges are public, so that the public can hold the judicial branch to proper account under transparency.
But no such charges have been filed, and no such trials have been held, and most importantly, there have been no convictions. It is absolutely and positively unthinkable, that if a terror plot was foiled, that no charges would be filed. If somebody had been discovered to prepare for “devastation with a hazard to the public”, that would mean a very serious crime had been committed with penalties including the harshest possible sentence – life in prison – and such criminals would have been brought to justice exactly 100% of the time, resulting in convictions if there were a “terror plot”.
Seeing how this has not happened, we can be absolutely certain that the wiretapping industry has stopped a total of exactly zero so-called “terror plots”.
In other words, when the governmental agencies of the wiretapping industry are mumbling about having stopped “fifty or so plots but we can’t tell you about them”, they are using a well-established political persuasion method called lying like a fucking weasel.http://falkvinge.net/2013/10/25/we-know-with-100-certainty-that-mass-surveillance-havent-foiled-a-single-terror-plot/