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Declassified Report From 2009 Questions Effectiveness of NSA Spying
schwit1 writes: With debate gearing up over the coming expiration of the Patriot Act surveillance law, the Obama administration on Saturday unveiled a 6-year-old report examining the once-secret program code-named Stellarwind, which collected information on Americans' calls and emails. The report was from the inspectors general of various intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
They found that while many senior intelligence officials believe the program filled a gap by increasing access to international communications, others including FBI agents, CIA analysts and managers "had difficulty evaluating the precise contribution of the [the surveillance system] to counterterrorism efforts because it was most often viewed as one source among many available analytic and intelligence-gathering tools in these efforts."
"The report said that the secrecy surrounding the program made it less useful. Very few working-level C.I.A. analysts were told about it. ... Another part of the newly disclosed report provides an explanation for a change in F.B.I. rules during the Bush administration. Previously, F.B.I. agents had only two types of cases: "preliminary" and "full" investigations. But the Bush administration created a third, lower-level type called an "assessment." This development, it turns out, was a result of Stellarwind.
They found that while many senior intelligence officials believe the program filled a gap by increasing access to international communications, others including FBI agents, CIA analysts and managers "had difficulty evaluating the precise contribution of the [the surveillance system] to counterterrorism efforts because it was most often viewed as one source among many available analytic and intelligence-gathering tools in these efforts."
"The report said that the secrecy surrounding the program made it less useful. Very few working-level C.I.A. analysts were told about it. ... Another part of the newly disclosed report provides an explanation for a change in F.B.I. rules during the Bush administration. Previously, F.B.I. agents had only two types of cases: "preliminary" and "full" investigations. But the Bush administration created a third, lower-level type called an "assessment." This development, it turns out, was a result of Stellarwind.
That's not what the report said, though.
The report said that the resources needed to be used more effectively.
I think that everyone agrees that this level of surveillance is bad for our society, but the report said something different from your summary.
1) Tell us that it is not effective; thus we need not worry about loss of privacy; thus we might we well let them continue ?
2) It is not effective because they have not got enough money for XXX; so: please Mr congress critter - vote them some more money
3) It is not effective; you need not worry about encrypting your communications; hopefully enough idiots will believe that!
Pick one of the above or come out with more suggestions.
Perhaps you should read it:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/25/us/25stellarwind-ig-report.html
It says Stellawind was illegal. That they knew it was illegal. That the FBI hid the details using a team '10' to scrub any mention of it, that the judges were misled, that Gonzales misled Congress, that it didn't work, that they misused NSLs, field officers said the info was garbage, their tests showed the results of random fishing were totally worthless, Yoo suggests Ashcroft hide it from [redacted] (likely Congress or the courts),
NYT even highlighted the meat of the report. Yet you spin it, perhaps hoping nobody will actually follow the link?
You datamine noise, the 'signal' you get is the portion of noise that maps your chosen filter. It's garbage and in the process you implement a mass surveillance system that threatens the core democracy.
The summary seems to indicate that the value of "Stellarwind" wasn't clear because it was one of many sources and few had access to it, not that all NSA spying was seen as ineffective.
The NSA does so much spying that it seems like it would be hard to ever calculate the marginal value of each additional unit of spying. Probably more so because of the fragmentary and unreliable nature of clandestine information and the need to develop multiple sources to achieve any kind of confidence about a particular conclusion or piece of information.
The latter bit is probably what leads to never-ending development of new data sources and methods, especially as each new spying method becomes less and less specific and requires more and more analysis to tease out information. Call metadata doesn't tell you what was discussed or necessarily who was called. You need parallel data from some other source to tell you who is associated with those numbers, where they were, etc.