Somehow NSA missed the Boston Marathon bombing, as did the rest of the intelligence and law enforcement community even after the Russians had provided a heads up. And one might also enumerate the failures to collect actionable information on countries and terrorist targets overseas, which suggest that the collection program itself is a bust. There was Benghazi, where US intelligence did not have a clue about what was impending or who the enemy was, leading to the deaths of four Americans. And then there were coups in Yemen, Egypt, and Mali plus events leading up to major terrorist attacks against civilian targets in India and Kenya. Every time a wedding party is wiped out in Pakistan, Yemen or Afghanistan one has to conclude that there was an intelligence failure in terms of collecting information and actually understanding it. One tends to think of NSA as one large computer that aspires to collect every bit of electronic communication in the world in real time but it is easy to forget that the information is useless unless someone can actually listen to or read it and try to figure out what it means. ... Whatever one thinks about the legality or illegality of what NSA and CIA do, there is a fundamental question that remains about whether their activities actually benefit the American people in any way. The real problem in aspiring to vacuum up the world’s electronic emissions can be regarded as systemic. The NSA and CIA programs have grown enormously, so much so that they will never catch up in terms of their ability to digest the vast quantities of information that they have to deal with. But the bottleneck is at the bottom. If information cannot be made usable all of NSA’s massive collection mechanism will be unable to do what it claims to do, i.e. deter terrorist plots. The record of success is not good based on what we do know in that there is currently little or no evidence to suggest that massive data collection accomplishes anything in spite of the repeated assertions by the White House and key Congressmen to the contrary.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Jan 2014 16:25:27 +0000
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