The deterrent clearly works, that's why America is the world's biggest jailer, right?
25% of all prison inmates in the world are in US prisons, drawn from 7% of the global population. Perhaps people in America are bigger crooks than anywhere else, because any other explanation involves poor priorities in government.
In network security, the government has taken the approach Sony did before their huge hack, hiring attorneys rather than network administrators to secure their servers. They understand increasing criminal penalties as a deterrent, actually securing systems and networks is more involved so they don't spend their time and money there. That doesn't bode well for the NSA "archive of everything" database being secure.