Do we need to keep internet surveillance secret from terrorists?

One of the arguments deployed to keep details secret of how the government snoops on our digital lives is that if details were public, then this would help terrorists.

We have seen the argument over Prism, and personally, I’ve seen it with the Home Office’s extended arguments about how revealing how much was spent on implementing part of RIPA a decade ago would help terrorists here and now.

Which makes the views of Richard A. Clarke, former top US anti-terrorism official under Presidents George HW Bush, Bill Clinton and George W Bush, particularly interesting:

The argument that this sweeping search must be kept secret from the terrorists is laughable. Terrorists already assume this sort of thing is being done. Only law-abiding American citizens were blissfully ignorant of what their government was doing.