Yet, inescapably, Australia and the United States have had to rely on those same Indonesian counterparts for help. Only the Indonesians can follow suspects; only the Indonesians can question friends and relatives. Except in a few spectacular cases—such as the arrest of one Bali bomber by Pakistani authorities in Abbottabad in 2011—the Indonesians are the ones who must carry out arrests, conduct trials, and impose punishments. What kind of job were the Indonesians doing? Were they following every clue? Were they tracking only low-level participants, while protecting more-senior and better-connected extremist figures?

Answering such questions is why states maintain intelligence agencies. Awkwardly, however, the very same imperatives that drive states to collect information also require them to deny doing so. These denials matter even when they are not believed. The Indonesian authorities may well have suspected that the Australians were surveilling their networks. They may have accepted that reality—or even tacitly welcomed it, since it improved their own counterterrorism efforts and reassured Australia and the U.S. But if acknowledged, the surveillance would have triggered negative reactions among nationalist Indonesians, constraining the Indonesian government’s cooperation with the Western powers. Which is exactly what has happened, thanks to Edward Snowden.

We all, or almost all, want the benefits of improved national security. From 1993 to 2001, the United States and its friends were hit again and again by terrorist attacks of increasing sophistication: from the first World Trade Center attack, to the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, to the embassy bombings in East Africa, to the bombing of the USS Cole, to the attacks of 9/11. Since 2001, terrorism has hardly ceased. But terrorists have experienced ever greater difficulty reaching into the U.S. and other advanced countries. In the words of a 2013 report from Europol, the European Union’s law-enforcement agency, the terrorist threat on the Continent “continues to evolve from one posed by structured groups and networks to smaller EU-based groups and solo terrorists.” In Europe as in the United States, terrorists who talk to each other have become exceedingly vulnerable. And a solo terrorist is generally a much less effective terrorist.

As we have become safer, we have, in that very human way, increasingly begrudged the means of our safety. The intellectual and political pendulum has swung against national-security agencies—indeed, against the basic requirements of an effective executive branch, which are the same today as when Alexander Hamilton outlined them in “Federalist No. 70” in 1788: “decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch.” Self-described reformers insist that the present-day U.S. government suffers from too much of these four elements. Since the 1970s, they have achieved great success in shifting government to be less decisive, less active, less secretive, and less able to move quickly—and not only in the domain of national security.