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.
Nature has provided us with a great method of oversight: math.
We request that the NSA be required to publish, on an annual basis, a few simple statistics so that the American people can make informed judgements about the NSA's actions.
A sample 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.