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NSA Metadata Collection Program Has Stopped Zero Attacks
Antipater writes "According to a member of the White House panel that recently called for the NSA's metadata-collection program to be curtailed, that program has not stopped any terrorist actions at all. This runs counter to the stories we've heard for months, which claimed as many as fifty prevented attacks. 'Stone declined to comment on the accuracy of public statements by U.S. intelligence officials about the telephone collection program, but said that when they referred to successes they seemed to be mixing the results of domestic metadata collection with the intelligence derived from the separate, and less controversial, NSA program, known as 702, to intercept communications overseas.'"
No politician that already has any real power is going to want to reign in the NSA. Politicians don't want to take anything like this back. If you're the one who does, and then an attack does happen, then regardless of whether or not it would have been prevented you're pretty much handing the next election to your opponent, who will claim that the attack was your fault because you were too soft.
If you were a sociopath and cared only about your career rather than doing what's right (as a politician generally is by the time they get elected to an office where they have any real power), would you make a decision at work that had a finite chance of completely ruining your career?
Sorta... the 702 program did catch some (apparently ~50). The 215 program has caught 0. 702 and 215 are the same program just segmented along foreign and domestic lines. The 215 program apparently caught 0 because they actually do not have enough data. As apparently the smaller phone companies were like 'you are going to pay for that right?' The NSA decided not to pay. (hey I read the article :))
The way I read that was they wanted more money to buy more data. Nevermind all that constitution stuff and right and wrong to do it at all...
I figure the current NSA is just a result of some capitalists making it rich via contracts to the military-industrial complex.
Tell that to Boeing, who just lost a major deal with Brazil over this.
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They could have said it did stop an attack but its a secret.
That's essentially EXACTLY what they said. They claimed several prevented attacks but refused to provide details.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Why has he not gotten in trouble legally yet?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The collection of metadata wasn't supposed to stop attacks. It was supposed to help identify possible terrorists That would allow applying for further surveillance to stop any attack and help identify other terrorists who helped with an attack, especially a suicide attack.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Morons. Really. Both the Captain Kirk wannabees that run the agency and their private sector "partners". Besides Boeing, we now find out that IBM hid a couple of billion in lost business with China stemming from the Snowden leaks from their shareholders. This just underscores for me that the people running things got where they are through a combination of luck and ruthlessness rather than smarts and discipline. Those of us old enough to have lived through the Cold War pretty quickly made the connection between what our government has been up to now and what went on in the police states on the other side of the Iron Curtain (although perhaps not with the same sense of dejavu that Angela Merkel does). That anyone involved in this still has not been impeached or fired is probably an indication of how far gone we are.
It certainly is somewhat surprising that the security community and the State Department didn't foresee something like this happening as a result of the spying. How large their blinders must be to have missed this.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
These programs caught no one. Until full analyses of the cases have been released, by no stretch of the imagination can you say that anyone was "caught." The best that the government "ABC/XYZ" organizations can do is entrap old, stupid people and paranoid schizophrenics whom they give the "bomb material" to. Don't give credit where it is not deserved, shill.
And given the way they publicise the "attacks" that they "stop" which are really just an informant giving fake bombs/weapons to some nut job ... you know they'd be shouting any successes from every rooftop they could get to. They'd be doing the talk show circuit and hosting their own news conferences.
The first problem is that the kind of "terrorism" that they want to focus on is almost non-existant in the USofA. The real terrorists had one huge success and that's all.
The second problem is that the real terrorists don't spend time gossipping on the phone with all their terrorist friends. Yes, it is a way to map out a social network. But this isn't Facebook. Sam the suicide does not have to call Bill the bomb every Tuesday at 7 to chat.
The metadata and phone location are useful for reconstructing the final days and those contacts AFTER an attack. And they don't need years of data for that. Or even months.
so do we still need the new 1.2 billion USD data centers?
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/politics/57281931-90/agency-center-changes-data.html.csp
Yes. There are nearly 200 countries filled with radios, radars, beacons, phones, networks, and so on that are controlling satellites, armies, air forces, and navies that produce data that gets captured and stored. The NSAs domestic phone record surveillance program is a small program.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Program A was never designed to do B
Program A was designed to do C, which could help in B
So by saying that A didn't help B is incorrect. C didn't do B. A helped C as designed.
This sort of retarded logic is all too common when technical people try and justify their failure.
The program as a whole hasn't worked. The metadata collection is part of the program, and it may be doing great - but it's value is basically 0, because the program's value is 0.
Of course we've spent billions of dollars on it with no real return. So there's that. It's kept a bunch of storage companies alive.
The NSA metadata collection (and related programs, like weakening crypto) is the attack. The damage done to the country is something that will become even more evident in the next months/years.