The National Security Agency is an extremely useful tool for keeping the American people safe and promoting American interests abroad. But like any powerful tool it can be abused, and must be closely monitored. Congress has shown it cannot monitor it effectively, but America's software engineers can.
We request that the NSA regularly publish a few simple statistics so that software engineers can provide informed judgement and oversight of the NSA's activities.
A prototype report:
In 2012, the National Security Agency collected a total of 1,500 uncompressed petabytes across 1.5 peta unique objects. Of those objects, 78% were deleted automatically by software filters, 12% were deleted after review by analysts, and 10% were deemed to meet NSA guidelines and moved to long term storage