The theory is that - much as the decentralised panopticon of Van Vogt's "Anarchistic Colossus" - we'll eventually be able to parse everything everybody ever says and preemptively stop bad things. The practice is that humans are pretty good at it and computers aren't yet (that we publicly know of).
Reading about Eagle Claw [1], I was surprised at how few human assets the US had in Iran, due to both post-Vietnam cuts and an increased belief in computer magic. It's been a while but I remember they had something like a couple of cooks in the embassy, and nobody outside... contrast this with General Kalugin's assertion in his biography that almost 2/3 of Soviet staff in the US was KGB!
More recently, Charlie Hebdo was followed by a few leaks from the DGSE complaining of budget cuts targeting human assets and "street" operations, and a reorg that definitely did not prioritize the man on the street (no link - I read it in French papers).
Pete Blaber, at the time commander of Delta Force, recently complained [2] that Operation Anaconda was plagued by generals who managed it from the comfort of their AC rooms in Washington, basing their decision on drone and satellite feeds, unwilling to trust the men on the ground (and even cutting the Delta Force team out of comms when they objected).
The sad thing is that HUMINT takes a long time to develop, and requires a lot of experience (which is partly why the Allied won the intelligence war over the freshly purged German apparatus). Firing those with that experience can lead to years of underperformance as the expertise is slowly rebuilt.
This is one of the reasons the CIA was happy to use former Nazis to hunt Soviet spies in Germany [3] - justified both by these men's extensive experience operating in the territory and the fact that the Stasi was doing the same. I think not enough has been said about how the recent (returning) obsession with electronic surveillance is potentially damaging that side of (genuine, needed) counter-terrorist capability.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eagle_Claw
[2] http://www.amazon.com/The-Mission-Men-Me-Commander/dp/042523... - what is most interesting was Delta Force's insistance on reading everything they could from previous defenders of the Shahi-Kot, thereby anticipating the exact way in which the enemy took down the helicopters later sent in by Washington, which was the way the locals used to shoot down Soviet helicopters.
Founders invariably suffer from some cognitive dissonance around the nature of their "shared goals" (eg: the "mission") when compared to those they employ. I can recall a cofounder insisting on including a section in performance self-review, wherein she expected us all to list how our personal dreams aligned with those of $employer.