Richard Posner in a lecture some years ago talked about how useful spying was during the cold war. Each side develop a far more accurate appreciation of the other’s strengths. As a result, it did not overreact nor under react to threats. For example, it was through U-2 spying that the USA learned that there was no missile gap with Russia. In fact, Russia is very weak and much less of a threat.
In 1983, Ronald Reagan learned through secret intelligence that through a series of misinterpretations of routine military manoeuvres in Western Europe, and some bureaucrats at Russian embassies trying to inflate their own importance and knowledge of the workings of their host governments, the Soviet leadership came to the impression that they were a ruse for war and they were under the threat of imminent attack. The Russians started to prepare to counter attack.
At the same time, a Korean airline was shot down by the Russian air force. Privately, Reagan and his advisers are horrified that such a thing could happen through a comedy of errors and that could lead to something far worse through mutual alarm and tests of will.
Reagan began seeking a rapprochement with the Kremlin fifteen months before Gorbachev took office. Reagan spoke of common concerns, the mutual desire for peace and the urgent need to address “dangerous misunderstandings” between Moscow and Washington.
I’ve long maintained the view that spies never discover anything useful about a country’s foreign enemies, though they are very useful in suppressing domestic opponents. This is a straightforward implication of game theory, but my attempts to explain it haven’t worked in the past, and I don’t know how to do much better. So, I’m going to restate my arguments from 10 years ago, against the massive expansion of spying that was already under way, and make the observation that the evidence since then strongly supports my case.
Despite an espionage and surveillance effort unparalleled in history, the US NSA has been unable to produce any convincing evidence of stopping even one domestic terror plot. Its best case was someone alleged to have sent a few thousand dollars to Al Shabab in Somalia. The NSA not only missed actual terror plotters like those in Boston, but also performed poorly relative…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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