I'm not sure why folks keep bringing up "Final Solution" rhetoric over and over again. There's 1.62 billion followers of Islam, which is 23%. They'd likely object to genocide, and that's a lot of people. Only 300 million Muslims live in the ME, 250 million Muslims live in Africa, over a billion live in Asia.
Even if we used every nuke in our arsenal and borrowed all of Russia's nukes, you wouldn't get more than about 60% of all Muslims and the rest would be thoroughly justified in any form of retaliation. At the moment, a handful of the 1.62 billion Muslims are active enemies of the US. Maybe about oh, two hundred. Rough guess, could be much lower. That care more about attacking America than any other target. You have about maybe 5,000-10,000 actual hardcore terrorists that don't see the US as a primary concern, but would definitely attack US interests if the opportunity presented itself. Then toss in about a hundred thousand wannabes, suckers, suck ups, useful idiots and other fluff. They're a source of money, supplies, low grade intel and low grade gopher work.
Folks on this board love to flatter themselves that the US is their primary target. It's generally not. It's completely unsurprising that they tend to care about their own neck of the woods far more than distant places they've never seen, but a lot of Americans are shocked at that. This is also why the Sunni wahabbi sect (which includes the Brotherhood, AQ and a hundred other groups) tend to kill oh, twenty or thirty Muslims for every one American. Hasn't anyone stopped and pondered why we've mostly only caught lone nuts? Think of all of the terrorists actually caught since 9/11. How many were actually part of hardcore AQ, Brotherhood or Wahabbi terrorist cells? How many were folks with mental issues, and basically went postal while screaming Allah Akbar? Any that weren't strict loners were teams of ... two? DC snipers and the Boston bombers are the only "cells" I remember being caught. I remember the FBI breaking up a handful of groups that may have turned into active terrorist cells. I also remember them essentially crafting terrorists from scratch a number of times as well.
Even AQ's masterstroke of 9/11 relied ENTIRELY on outdated thinking. Old days, folks hijacked a plane to send a message. You had a better chance of surviving by just sitting still and waiting for the police/military to handle it. Now, NO ONE is going to hijack a commercial plane and crash it into something. The other passengers would beat them to death in about 30 seconds. Sure, they could switch to something else. Blowing up pipelines, sinking a ship in a major harbor, suicide bombing some malls, whatever. But it's hard and not many people want to travel across the world to blow themselves up, especially when it will bring the wrath of the US military on their network. Safer and simpler to try to go after easier targets.
Instead of spying on ordinary Americans, we'd be best served to take all of that budget and toss the overwhelming majority into screening visa holders, tourists and folks applying for citizenship. Basically looking for general mental health instead of fundamentalism, but that's a large factor. If someone is fundamentalist enough to kill a bunch of innocent folks, they're generally not very right in the head to begin with.
It is interesting to hear the perspective of an insider. So do you think that the genie can be put back in the bottle? How do you keep tight reins on the intelligence apparatus? Is there an effective strategy for getting good, timely, relevant information on our enemies while respecting freedoms, or does one have to be sacrificed for the other?
Everything Gewehr98 said. It boils down to needing a feedback loop. Only major thing I'd suggest differently would be to make it mandatory to refresh folks doing the oversight every X years. FISC judges should only serve 4 years, same with Select Intelligent Committees members, and same with IGs. Decentralized IG, with actual power to do anything other than crushing whistleblowers, is the most important step. They should be empowered to bypass all bureaucracy and report directly to the Select Intelligence Committees, with a mandatory CC to POTUS.
Unless you count the Church Commitee.
I bet they thought what Lincoln did was ireversible too. Especially after the effects of Reconstruction became known. 
Fitz, if we really are a bunch of lazy moronic shitheads, it's lost. We won't be able to fix it either now or later.
Better hope you're wrong.
NSA spied on the Church Committee, obviously it wasn't that effective.
Jokes aside. Church Committee did help expose a bunch of illegal programs. Their only meaningful gesture was getting a ban on assassination of political leaders. Rumsfeld, the guy who later became Secretary of Defense, was instrumental in ensuring the Church Committee did not meaningfully curtail intelligence agencies. One of Rumsfeld's minions, Robert Ellsworth, went around downplaying everything. "They were very specific about their effort to destroy American intelligence [capabilities]. It was Senator Church who said our intelligence agencies were 'rogue elephants.' They were supposedly out there assassinating people and playing dirty tricks and so forth... Well, that just wasn't true." It was a lie back then, as much as it's a lie today.
Our intelligence agencies are still assassinating people without oversight, violating US laws, etc. Oh, there's a couple hoops, which probably make it worse for America because it lends the illusion of legality to their actions. FISA courts are a rubber stamp. Out of 33,949 requests since 1979, they have turned down 11 requests. That's not a typo. They've said "No" 11 times and "Yes" 33,942 times. An astute person might say, hey, those numbers don't seem to match. Yea, that's because the US government said "Pretty please", and the FISA courts said "Well, ok" in 4 of the 11 cases so really they said "No" 7 times.
That's 0.0002% denial rate, spread across three and a half decades. Or a 99.9998% approval rate. That's an excessively high approval rate for totalitarian states, let alone an allegedly Constitutional republic. I'd almost rather we shut down the FISA courts and let the intel folks do their stuff illegally. At least it'd be more honest.
There's a bloody good reason why the NSA was monitoring Senator Church. Because he told us today's headlines nearly 40 years ago.
"In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.
If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.
I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."
-Senator Frank Church (August 17, 1975)
