NSA Metadata Collection Program Has Stopped Zero Attacks

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NSA Metadata Collection Program Has Stopped Zero Attacks

Posted by Soulskill on Friday December 20, 2013 @08:23AM from the raise-your-hand-if-you're-surprised dept.

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.'"

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Wait a second... by SteveFoerster · 2013-12-20 08:25 · Score: 5, Funny

You mean the lying liars who lie for a living... lied?

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1. Re:Wait a second... by SteveFoerster · 2013-12-20 08:45 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Tell that to Boeing, who just lost a major deal with Brazil over this.
  
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2. Re:Wait a second... by Anonymous Coward · 2013-12-20 09:05 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
3. Re:Wait a second... by khasim · 2013-12-20 09:19 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  They claimed several prevented attacks but refused to provide details.
  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.
The NSA probed our anus and found shit by Anonymous Coward · 2013-12-20 08:28 · Score: 5, Funny

The NSA probed our anus and found shit. What else is new.
Let's take them at their word, and count bodies by Bob+the+Super+Hamste · 2013-12-20 08:41 · Score: 5, Interesting

Let's take them at their word and say that they did manage to stop 50 attacks. So that works out to about 4 attacks per year for the past 12 years. I will even give them the benefit that every attack would have killed as many people as the 9/11 attack. So that would give us somewhere around 13,000 people per year that would have been killed by these attacks. So without their violation of our rights terrorism would rank behind drug abuse and we don't seem to care that much about drug abuse. Even if all 50 attacks happened this year and each one killed ~3000 people the body count would only be 150,000 and terrorism would come in at #2 between being a fat ass and being a smoker.

Now in reality the number of attacks is probably much lower than the 50 they claim, and I would be willing to bet that at most a few dozen people would be killed in the most devastating of these attacks. So as others have pointed out before why are we wasting so much money and violating everyone's rights for something that is little more than a statistical anomaly.

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Re:I doesn't matter by SteveFoerster · 2013-12-20 08:42 · Score: 5, Insightful

Not to be all conspiratorial, but I think it's been a while now since politicians were really in charge of this sort of thing.

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Re:Of course it didn't. by cayenne8 · 2013-12-20 08:48 · Score: 5, Insightful

I'm really curious what other US citizen could directly and provably lie to congress, and not be arrested and indited for it, like J. Clapper?
Why has he not gotten in trouble legally yet?

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let's not be so pessimistic by Trepidity · 2013-12-20 08:58 · Score: 5, Funny

Another way of phrasing this is that the NSA's metadata collection program, while admittedly not perfect, has met or exceeded the benchmarks set by peer agencies, such as the TSA.

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