AS MEMBERS OF CONGRESS struggle to agree on which surveillance programs to re-authorize before the Patriot Act expires, they might consider the unusual advice of an intelligence analyst at the National Security Agency who warned about the danger of collecting too much data. Imagine, the analyst wrote in a leaked document, that you are standing in a shopping aisle trying to decide between jam, jelly or fruit spread, which size, sugar-free or not, generic or Smucker’s. It can be paralyzing.
“We in the agency are at risk of a similar, collective paralysis in the face of a dizzying array of choices every single day,” the analyst wrote in 2011. “’Analysis paralysis’ isn’t only a cute rhyme. It’s the term for what happens when you spend so much time analyzing a situation that you ultimately stymie any outcome …. It’s what happens in SIGINT [signals intelligence] when we have access to endless possibilities, but we struggle to prioritize, narrow, and exploit the best ones.”
The document is one of about a dozen in which NSA intelligence experts express concerns usually heard from the agency’s critics: that the U.S. government’s “collect it all” strategy can undermine the effort to fight terrorism. The documents, provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, appear to contradict years of statements from senior officials who have claimed that pervasive surveillance of global communications helps the government identify terrorists before they strike or quickly find them after an attack.
The Patriot Act, portions of which expire on Sunday, has been used since 2001 to conduct a number of dragnet surveillance programs, including the bulk collection of phone metadata from American companies. But the documents suggest that analysts at the NSA have drowned in data since 9/11, making it more difficult for them to find the real threats. The titles of the documents capture their overall message: “Data Is Not Intelligence,” “The Fallacies Behind the Scenes,” “Cognitive Overflow?” “Summit Fever” and “In Praise of Not Knowing.” Other titles include “Dealing With a ‘Tsunami’ of Intercept” and “Overcome by Overload?”
The documents are not uniform in their positions. Some acknowledge the overload problem but say the agency is adjusting well. They do not specifically mention the Patriot Act, just the larger dilemma of cutting through a flood of incoming data. But in an apparent sign of the scale of the problem, the documents confirm that the NSA even has a special category of programs that is called “Coping With Information Overload.”
The jam vs. jelly document, titled “Too Many Choices,” started off in a colorful way but ended with a fairly stark warning: “The SIGINT mission is far too vital to unnecessarily expand the haystacks while we search for the needles. Prioritization is key.”
These doubts are infrequently heard from officials inside the NSA. These documents are a window into the private thinking of mid-level officials who are almost never permitted to discuss their concerns in public.
AN AMUSING PARABLE circulated at the NSA a few years ago. Two people go to a farm and purchase a truckload of melons for a dollar each. They then sell the melons along a busy road for the same price, a dollar. As they drive back to the farm for another load, they realize they aren’t making a profit, so one of them suggests, “Do you think we need a bigger truck?”
The parable was written by an intelligence analyst in a document dated Jan. 23, 2012 that was titled, “Do We Need a Bigger SIGINT Truck?” It expresses, in a lively fashion, a critique of the agency’s effort to collect what former NSA Director Keith Alexander referred to as “the whole haystack.” The critique goes to the heart of the agency’s drive to gather as much of the world’s communications as possible: because it may not find what it needs in a partial haystack of data, the haystack is expanded as much as possible, on the assumption that more data will eventually yield useful information.
“The problem is that when you collect it all, when you monitor everyone, you understand nothing.”
–Edward Snowden
The Snowden files show that in practice, it doesn’t turn out that way: more is not necessarily better, and in fact, extreme volume creates its own challenges.
“Recently I tried to answer what seemed like a relatively straightforward question about which telephony metadata collection capabilities are the most important in case we need to shut something off when the metadata coffers get full,” wrote the intelligence analyst. “By the end of the day, I felt like capitulating with the white flag of, ‘We need COLOSSAL data storage so we don’t have to worry about it,’ (aka we need a bigger SIGINT truck).” The analyst added, “Without metrics, how do we know that we have improved something or made it worse? There’s a running joke … that we’ll only know if collection is important by shutting it off and seeing if someone screams.”
Another document, while not mentioning the dangers of collecting too much data, expressed concerns about pursuing entrenched but unproductive programs.
“How many times have you been watching a terrible movie, only to convince yourself to stick it out to the end and find out what happens, since you’ve already invested too much time or money to simply walk away?” the document asked. “This ‘gone too far to stop now’ mentality is our built-in mechanism to help us allocate and ration resources. However, it can work to our detriment in prioritizing and deciding which projects or efforts are worth further expenditure of resources, regardless of how much has already been ‘sunk.’ As has been said before, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
“We are drowning in information. And yet we know nothing. For sure.”
–NSA Intelligence Analyst
Many of these documents were written by intelligence analysts who had regular columns distributed on NSANet, the agency’s intranet. One of the columns was called “Signal v. Noise,” another was called “The SIGINT Philosopher.” Two of the documents cite the academic work of Herbert Simon, who won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering research on what’s become known as the attention economy. Simon wrote that consumers and managers have trouble making smart choices because their exposure to more information decreases their ability to understand the information. Both documents mention the same passage from Simon’s essay, Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World:
“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
In addition to consulting Nobel-prize winning work, NSA analysts have turned to easier literature, such as Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. The author of a 2011 document referenced Blink and stated, “The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.” The author added, “Gladwell has captured one of the biggest challenges facing SID today. Our costs associated with this information overload are not only financial, such as the need to build data warehouses large enough to store the mountain of data that arrives at our doorstep each day, but also include the more intangible costs of too much data to review, process, translate and report.”
Alexander, the NSA director from 2005 to 2014 and chief proponent of the agency’s “collect it all” strategy, vigorously defended the bulk collection programs. “What we have, from my perspective, is a reasonable approach on how we can defend our nation and protect our civil liberties and privacy,” he said at a security conference in Aspen in 2013. He added, “You need the haystack to find the needle.” The same point has been made by other officials, including James Cole, the former deputy attorney general who told a congressional committee in 2013, “If you’re looking for the needle in the haystack, you have to have the entire haystack to look through.”
NSA Slide, May 2011
The opposing viewpoint was voiced earlier this month by Snowden, who noted in an interview with the Guardian that the men who committed recent terrorist attacks in France, Canada and Australia were under surveillance—their data was in the haystack yet they weren’t singled out. “It wasn’t the fact that we weren’t watching people or not,” Snowden said. “It was the fact that we were watching people so much that we did not understand what we had. The problem is that when you collect it all, when you monitor everyone, you understand nothing.”
In a 2011 interview with SIDtoday, a deputy director in the Signals Intelligence Directorate was asked about “analytic modernization” at the agency. His response, while positive on the NSA’s ability to surmount obstacles, noted that it faced difficulties, including the fact that some targets use encryption and switch phone numbers to avoid detection. He pointed to volume as a particular problem.
“We live in an Information Age when we have massive reserves of information and don’t have the capability to exploit it,” he stated. “I was told that there are 2 petabytes of data in the SIGINT System at any given time. How much is that? That’s equal to 20 million 4-drawer filing cabinets. How many cabinets per analyst is that? By the end of this year, we’ll have 1 terabyte of data per second coming in. You can’t crank that through the existing processes and be effective.”
The documents noted the difficulty of sifting through the ever-growing haystack of data. For instance, a 2011 document titled “ELINT Analysts – Overcome by Overload? Help is Here with IM&S” outlined a half dozen computer tools that “are designed to invert the paradigm where an analyst spends more time searching for data than analyzing it.” Another document, written by an intelligence analyst in 2010, bluntly stated that “we are drowning in information. And yet we know nothing. For sure.” The analyst went on to ask, “Anyone know just how many tools are available at the Agency, alone? Would you know where to go to find out? Anyone ever start a new target…without the first clue where to begin? Did you ever start a project wondering if you were the sole person in the Intelligence Community to work this project? How would you find out?” The analyst, trying to encourage more sharing of tips about the best ways to find data in the haystack, concluded by writing, in boldface, “Don’t let those coming behind you suffer the way you have.”
The agency appears to be spending significant sums of money to solve the haystack problem. The document headlined “Dealing With a ‘Tsunami’ of Intercept,” written in 2006 by three NSA officials and previously published by The Intercept, outlined a series of programs to prepare for a near future in which the speed and volume of signals intelligence would explode “almost beyond imagination.” The document referred to a mysterious NSA entity–the “Coping With Information Overload Office.” This appears to be related to an item in the Intelligence Community’s 2013 Budget Justification to Congress, known as the “black budget”—$48.6 million for projects related to “Coping with Information Overload.”
The data glut is felt in the NSA’s partner agency in Britain, too. A slideshow entitled “A Short Introduction to SIGINT,” from GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, posed the following question: “How are people supposed to keep on top of all their targets and the new ones when they have far more than [they] could do in a day? How are they supposed to find the needle in the haystack and prioritise what is most important to look at?” The slideshow continued, “Give an analyst three leads, one of which is interesting: they may have time to follow that up. Give them three hundred leads, ten of which are interesting: that’s probably not much use.”
These documents tend to shy away from confrontation—they express concern with the status quo but do not blame senior officials or demand an abrupt change of course. They were written by agency staffers who appear to believe in the general mission of the NSA. For instance, the author of a “SIGINT Philosopher” column wrote that if the NSA was a corporation, it could have the following mission statement: “building informed decision makers — so that targets do not suffer our nation’s wrath unless they really deserve it — by exercising deity-like monitoring of the target.”
On occasion, however, the veil of bureaucratic deference is lowered. In another “SIGINT Philosopher” column, “Cognitive Overflow?,” the author offered a forthright assessment of the haystack problem and the weakness of proposed solutions:
“If an individual brain has finite ‘channel capacity,’ does the vast collective of SID, comprised of thousands of brilliant, yet limited, brains also have a definite ‘channel capacity’? If so, what is it? How do we know when we’ve reached it? What if we’ve already exceeded it? In essence, could SID’s reach exceed its grasp? Can the combined cognitive power of SID connect all the necessary dots to avoid, predict, or advise when the improbable, complex, or unthinkable happens?”
The column did not offer an optimistic view.
“Take for example the number of tools, clearances, systems, compliances, and administrative requirements we encounter before we even begin to engage in the work of the mission itself,” the column continued. “The mission then involves an ever-expanding set of complex issues, targets, accesses, and capabilities. The ‘cognitive burden,’ so to speak, must at times feel overwhelming to some of us.”
The analyst who wrote the column dismissed, politely but firmly, the typical response of senior officials when they are asked in public about their ability to find needles in their expanding haystack.
“Surely someone will point out that the burgeoning amalgam of technological advances will aid us in shouldering the burden,” he noted. “However, historically, this scenario doesn’t seem to completely bear out. The onslaught of more computer power—often intended to automate some processes—has in many respects demanded an expansion of our combined ‘channel capacity’ rather than curbing the flow of the information.”
______
Documents published with this article:
- Too Many Choices
- Cognitive Overflow?
- Summit Fever
- Do We Need a Bigger SIGINT Truck?
- Overcome With Overload? Help is Here with IM&S
- In Praise of Not Knowing
- The Fallacies Behind the Scenes
- Leave Bright Pebbles, Not Breadcrumbs, for Those Coming After You
- ‘Data Is Not Intelligence’
- Is There a Sustainable Ops Tempo in S2? How Can Analysts Deal with the Flood of Collection?
- Dealing With a ‘Tsunami’ of Intercept
- SIGINT Mission Thread 3
Related:
The massive (phone meta-)data collection program is rather useless for catching terrorists, as anyone having taken the course of introductory medical statistics can tell you, where you try to evaluate the efficiency of various medical tests for rare or common diseases. Arguments for ‘collect it all’ ignore the ‘prevalence’ of terrorists.
E.g. assume there are 1000 evil terrorists in in the U.S. and you have a computer program which catches them with 99% efficiency, but it also has a 1% false positive rate. (There is no program as good, but let’s assume almost-perfection.)
So hurray! We now caught 990 of the 1000 terrorists, and are safer! That’s what most people think. BUt:
Not so fast. The program actually identifies ~1% of the (U.S.) population, some 3 million (=1% of, say,300 million [actually ~320 million]), as terrorists, so if it identifies you as a terrorist, the chance that you are actually one is ~990/3 million = 1/3030 = 0.033%.
So for a single terrorist you want to identify conclusively, you have to look again at ~three thousand innocent people. But among these 3000, there will be quite a number who, on second look, do look quite suspicious; travelers abroad (especially the Middle East or South Asia), people with names such as Mohamed, or accidentally sharing a name with someone who is also suspected….
This article shows that NSA etc. have exactly that problem (and, for lack of any of them having taken a good statistics class, or just going through the algebra above) do not clearly recognize it. (To be true, many medical professionals also don’t recognize this, e.g. if your blood bank says you are HIV-positive, it is most likely a ‘false positive,’ as prevalence of HIV carriers among blood donors it rather low)
A program of mass surveillance worked much ‘better’ in the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany); there any surveillance was much more likely to net an opponent of the regime, as indeed a high percentage of the population did oppose the regime. (Of course, picking a person at random would find regime critics at the same rate.)
The purpose of the surveillance there was largely to discourage any internal opposition, although, of course, it was also advertised as needed to fight foreign capitalist spies and saboteurs and such. (They’d call them terrorists today.) Luckily enough for many East Germans, the Stasi did only have limited technical means. But it did work to intimidate many people, fearful for their safety, family, career… and, to maintain this intimidation, a fair number of people did go to jail, or had their career aborted.
Thus one can conclude that mass surveillance is much better in keeping domestic opponents in check than in finding actual terrorists, and that intimidating the local population may be, or become at some time, its actual use. There are already a fair number of reports that secret (local or NSA, FBI) police operations, presumably anti-terrorist, actually targeted anti-Iraq war demonstrators, or the Raging Grannies, or Occupy Wall Street, or, as another post says, the former girl friends of those doing the surveillance.
In “Is There a Sustainable Ops Tempo in the S2?” it’s mentioned how they need to “fundamentally change” how they interact with SIGINT.
It’s talked about how they took pride and have been trained to manage the information in accordance with the 4th Amendment. It was their job to render the information safe for others. But now it’s believed they have “developed an awareness of the information and an understanding of our authorities that allows us to think dfferently about that relationship… and in so doing, to create an increased capacity and recover more time for the analysts”
“The key is to better leverage the Intelligence Community and our partner relationships for the exploitation of SIGINT, which is something in the past we would not have done to the degree we’re proposing.”
“We must take advantage of the expertise and capabilities in the IC and our customer base to enhance discovery and capacity and to make the actionable information available almost as soon as we encounter it.”
In other words, the 4th Amendment is time consuming. Because of the ever growing haystack, the NSA needs to cut legal corners to be cost effective.
If they don’t know whether the information they’re handing off is good or not (need for experts in other fields) and won’t even bother with the 4th Amendment, then what info is getting delivered and to whom? If they were the guardians of protecting Americans privacy before, in theory, then we also know that who they’re giving the information over to are not bound by the same restrictions they have probably by now officially tossed.
Customer base? What the hell.
In the “In praise of not knowing” there is a reference to customers: “We got 87 positive feeback reports from customers!” and “Occasionally hearing “you know we just aren’t able to answe the questions our customers really want” can actually be a refreshing bit of honesty”
Just wondering who the customers are.
As I understand it, “Customers” tends to refer to other agencies with which NSA shares the data it collects (e.g. CIA, DOD, DHS, etc).
Well, Peter, the last NSA official to publically criticize it is living in Russia. So, there is that to consider.
Is it possible the real purpose of “collect-it-all” surveillance is to obscure rather than conceal the facts of the Global War On Terrorism?
The article highlights the fact that there are concerns that collecting too much information makes it harder (not easier) to find a needle in a haystack. But my problem with it (and most Americans’ problem with it) is that it violates the US Constitution. The fact that it makes needle finding harder or easier is irrelevant.
Well, to connect this story to another TI story about former Speaker Hastert, this is an object lesson on data aggregation. Maybe it doesn’t flag you as a terror or drug suspect, but the data is always there for some future prosecutor to examine, in Hastert’s case, $3.5 million in money movement.
Since it’s not useful for its stated reasons, it will be put to more banal use. As in Albright’s Maxim: What’s the use of having this extraordinary capability if you don’t USE it? The possibilities are endless: looking for past transgressions to feed the profit prison complex; political blackmail; targeting political opponents; you name it, it’s a treasure trove on so many levels, with the best part the secrecy and unaccountability. To mess with the lives of others without limitation, something the omniscient Deity wisely refuses, while human fools who want to be gods blindly rush in where angels fear to tread.
This.
The article is unimpressive. The real terrorist is the US government, so the discussion about how to ‘optimize’ the NSA criminal operatins is nonsense. The way to stop terrorism is to exterminate the US government.
NSA needs to get out the word.
– – –
Dear Zelda,
Here I am, cooped up in a chilly attic, alone, wearing clammy headphones and listening to the theater couple in apartment 3G. I’ve been doing this every night for two weeks now, nothing but a thermos of bad coffee with me, while my subjects are living a wonderful life, having parties, making love, playing the piano. I sit here, envious, bored, getting back pains from this chair. Sometimes I cry, listening to the lives of these others. What can I do?
Sincerely,
Agent HGW XX/7
– – –
Dear HGW,
Why, this is shocking. You’d think we were the Stasi or something. You should inform your controller about Operation Constant Nightlight, which s/he obviously hasn’t been briefed on. The operatives on live surveillance are in comfy cubicles at Ft. Meade, plenty of hot coffee and donuts, a yoga room right down the hall, and they’re more productive: each one can eavesdrop on 20 such couples. SIGINT means so much more than just an old-fashioned J. Edgar Hoover tap on their phones — we can monitor their appliances, their flatscreen voice-activated TV, their refrigerator, even their daughter’s talking Barbie doll — and it’s all voice-recognition. We can collect terabytes of data just from your one couple’s unit, and you can sift it at leisure.
.
Time for your controller to join the 21st Century. A good man like yourself deserves better working conditions.
Zelda
A former American friend of mine — an American liberal with multiple advanced degrees — once suggested I watch “The Lives of Others” because he could not form a reasoned argument supporting American Totalitarianism. (Another American PhD’s whataboutery.) I had already seen it, and have since done some reading about the DDR’s Stasi. Sometimes I think East German Zersetzung targets had a relatively easy time. At least they lived among people who hated the Stasi — except for the numerous snitches — and had a pretty good idea about what was going on even before being able see their files, after the DDR died. American Stasi targets live in a very different environment, populated by ignorant consumers who adore their Stasi, and jump at the chance to do their patriotic bit for the brave people making them safe.
That’s the trouble with metaphors: they’re not always exact fits. We may be somewhere between “The Lives of Others” and “V for Vendetta.” For that matter, we’re in a world that seems a mashup of Kafka, Orwell and Philip K. Dick. It’s not a pleasant time, and more so because we get echoes from those who anticipated this in some form.
Maybe some future generations can see what material they had on us, just as in the former DDR. It’ll have to be post-regime, I fear.
I am not nearly as annoyed by anything they might have on me as I am by their attacks. (The Stasi and their patriotic supporters can accuse me of hating them, but that’s a virtue, not a crime.)
And waiting for post-regime time is unacceptable.
Noy to mention the American Stasi’s use of ‘electronic zersetzung.’ That’s the American police state’s contribution to extrajudicial punishment. Dr. Robert Duncan says the electronic torture is one grand experiment played by
the CIA with ‘game theory’ — to play to the end.http://www.drrobertduncan.com/dr-robert-duncans-neuropsychological-and-electronic-no-touch-torture-report.html
There has to be something about this in Snowden docs. Please dig in.
Stasi pest, too afraid to meet me person.
I’ll see you at the Congressional hearing, deal?
That is as meaningful as telling an atheist you will see him in heaven… Deal?
Look forward to seeing the burns on your DEW buddies here in the Bay Area soon.
To: Mr. Hoyt’s lawyer
Re: Please ask for info. from the NSA. I’ll approve it.
~ WHY DOESN’T BOEHNER WANT THE NSA TO DO THEIR JOB? ~
Hoyt may have been drugged … something slipped into his drink or whatever.
I was poisoned in 2006 — two weeks after I started defended GW Bush by encouraging him to end govt. policies of “torture.” I didn’t agree that torture is patriotic, like Boehner does.
My defense was effective, including my communications with Governor Schwarzenegger and Rep. Dolittle and published letters in newspapers.
Then I was attacked for my effective defense of GW Bush, who seemed to be sleepwalking at the time. I nearly died. The attacks continued.
I asked the CIA and FBI to please help US figure out who was attacking GW Bush and those who supported him, such as Mr. Cheney.
How did Hoyt feel about Mrs. Boehner? Apparently, Mr. Boehner isn’t exactly complimentary of her in public. I can’t imagine what he says about her in bars. Might Hoyt be the man who knew too much?
Seems to me they were “adequate” enough when they got the goods on Eliot Spitzer, forcing him out.
Seems like they may have been efficient in removing Michael Hastings from any embarrassing stories he may have been working on.
They did screw up royally where Edward Snowden was concerned, according to the latest several interviews these past several days at Democracy Now! with Julian Assange (www.democracynow.org).
Perhaps they are spending too much time on financial intellgence for their money masters?
So it would be both more effective to focus efforts on legitimate targets, I.e. as described in a warrant. This fits my intuition that far from making us more safe, these clowns are wasting their time while selling the illusion of security. They cannot claim even one success, while missing all of 7/7, Madrid, Boston among others. Prediction is a tricky business, as the saying goes, especially when about the future …
If their collect it all system is poor at detecting threats and conspiracies within a disbursed data set, one might wonder what such a system is especially good at. Well, for one thing their database should be very effective for looking up on a specific known individual. all their web searches and email communications. A criminal suspect for example – that could be a legitimate application if so constructed. But care that those empowered by the system cannot use it against anyone who is inconvenient, or with whom they have a personal grievance. How convenient for neutralising opponents whether in the commercial, political spheres, or just out of personal spite. For that matter if a system is known to exist then why not chuck in some fabricated ‘intel’ on the target as no one will be able to gainsay the exercise. None of this ends well by the way …
Your comments, Redthread, are spot on, and from what I’ve read of William Binney’s comments, the people at the top are really that interested in National Security.
We know now that leading up to 9/11/01, something around five FBI field agents had a strong idea as to what was to come, but the idiots(?), incompetents (?), traitors (??) in FBI mnagement ignored them.
Likewise, when Julie Sirrs was an analyst with the DIA, after her fact-finding mission to Pakistan and Afghanistan, she returned with evidence that the CIA and Unocal was arming and financing the Taliban (and by extension, al Qaeda), along with an impending warning of a 9/11-type terrorist attack on US soil, and the DIA management forced her out.
Nothing from the NSA, or CIA, but now thanks to the Senate summary on the CIA torture report, and fine reporting from The Intercept, we know that the CIA’s Alfreda Bikowsky Silverstein did sit on the incriminating evidence which might have interdicted the 9/11 attacks.
The spies in my building do seem to live boring lives surveilling me and my family on shifts. But they do wear nice clothes and drive nice cars. They also have their houses cleaned for them, dig walkers as needed, and I believe they even provide babysitters. But their lives seem utterly devoid of enjoyment. Even though I am imprisoned by their surveilling and torture, they too are prisoners of mine. They just don’t realize that. What utterly empty lives they lead. Nothing about them is authentic.
Fix: dog walkers as needed, and they are even provided babysitters.
I also notice that many couples are recruited to work together.
I enjoyed the amusing parable, but wouldn’t this be a more accurate depiction of reality?
“Two people go to a farm and purchase a truckload of melons for a dollar each.
They then pretend they sold the melons along a busy road for twice the price, but they never actually managed to sell any of the melons.
As they drive back to the farm for another load, they realize they aren’t making a profit, so one of them suggests, “Do you think we need a bigger truck?”
(laughing)
“collect it all” strategy can undermine the effort to fight terrorism… The justification used for the broad, secret surveillance powers is fight against terrorism, but the real purpose of warrantless surveillance is intelligence gathering and population control. No wonder that there is a clash.
The “Collect Everything” idea/philosophy/intention is a process of dominating the battle space of the internet and digital communications.
The US considers the globe, cyber space and outer space including the moon and all space up to and including geosynchronous satellite orbits and perhaps beyond as battlefields where the rules of war apply. The overarching purpose of collection and hacking and bugging is to serve that purpose. The stated policy is “Global full spectrum domination”.
The US has the biggest hammer and all the world is a nail.
Great last line.
The biggest hammer but no enemies its equal. What will it do? Start smashing little people.
This story assumes that stopping terrorism is the primary goal, and not gathering blackmail material to be used against leaders of other countries, and presumably also against leaders of this country. As Russ Tice pointed out, stopping terrorism was an afterthought, a cover story to explain why they were gathering so much information.
ODOJ inspector general report; doesn’t think much of Section 215.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/28/washington-wisdom-data-collection-shown-justice-department-verdict
Prominent on the Guardian front page right now. Worth highlighting the link.
It’s a really good story and now we’ve got it in the comments, so that’ll have to do; hard to shoehorn a link into my piece right now.
It doesn’t matter what the analyst want. Ask the Army if they want all of those tanks that congress keeps in the budget every year. It’s all about the flow of money from the treasury to the contractors to the congressional campaign funds.
If the intelligence contractors thought they could make money torturing kittens, Diane Feinstein would be cheerleading the roundup from the Senate floor.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that the goverent kills 40,000 cats a year.
You are spot on: this is about the money train. No one is actually closely supervising the contractors. I have a passing acquaintance who has friends in intelligence and he tells me they complain that things are “a mess” and out of control inside.
I remember seeing a TV program about a hoarder who had no space left to move around their own home, but still couldn’t force themselves to part with any of the items they’d accumulated. I don’t recall whether the person worked for the NSA or not.
Keep them coming Mr. Masss and the TI team, this is how it ends…
“Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.” – T. Jefferson
Thanks, we’ll keep at it!
Please form distribution agreements with HuffPo, BoingBoing and perhaps FireDogLake to educate and inspire more members of the public. The only way any of this will change is if we act enmasse to force Congress to heed our wishes.
We’re working on things like that! Thanks.
(laughing)
Peter Maass – 20 Dec 2014 at 10:50 am
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/19/senior-cia-officer-center-torture-scandals-alfreda-bikowsky/#comment-96887
A Blowing Arse Smoke Production
Oh wow! You just named three sites (HuffPo, Boingboing and FireDogLake) which practise considerable censorship in their comments section, tending towards the vanilla.
Oh wow, I’m
surprised. But BB and FDL share positions, and HuffPo publishes anything that moves.
Nothing too surprising. The NSA is a big place. Not everybody is working on PRISM and related projects that are collecting your phone and internet data. I expect every agent has their own opinion on the matters. But, it unfortunately shows how incompetent the leadership and the figureheads are and is why we got into this mess. Reap what you sow.
Yup, according to Robert Scheer’s latest book, They Know Everything About You, they are spending far too much time on their LOVINT!