The immense value of leaking raw data (suitably redacted) :

NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds - The Washington Post

The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance. In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans.

This sort of report provides crucial elements that are not reported to the overseers...

This underlines the truth of Snowden's famous allegation that he could access the correspondance of any US citizen. Probably it would have been easy to subsequently class the unauthorised search as a typing error or whatever.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}