The problem with all the data is not
and curiously it never has been about the data ,but the outright lack
of imagination within the intel community. It is actually proving to
be easy enough to identify potential threats. In all cases cited,
the perps had been identified long before any action.
It is asking way too much to set up a
action plan for identified potential threats. One stage is a go to
contact for simply allowing the eyeballs to send key actionable data,
however weak it might be. That removes the responsibility
immediately from the first observer who could be anyone.
At that point a team does a preliminary
work up and likely put the individual on a three month monitoring
cycle with a case officer. Case officers will be in position to
connect dots if any exist. From there expanded intervention becomes
possible.
More important, it becomes possible to
be preemptive. If we have learned anything these folks need support.
That opens up the door for many types of direct action. How about
confronting a budding jihadi with his conversations and forcing him
to become a spy while confirming his contacts? This makes his
original support group impotent and scares him as well. It is a long
way back to been effective again after such an action.
My point is that we have the data and
we are not been too clever at all in using it to win. Do it this
way, and we simply search only that data targeted through tips. The
data by itself is not naturally self sorting in a helpful manner. If
we make it a practice of confronting the individual, we make the
whole jihadi network profoundly suspect to any new recruit.
Tr6y the link
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-31/edward-snowdens-unaired-remarks-about-september-11
There
was much said in last week's primetime interview between Edward
Snowden and NBC's Brian Williams. But perhaps more interesting than
what was said in the one hour time-slot, was what was contained in
the three extra hours of conversations that were not broadcast, such
as Snowden's questioning of the American intelligence community’s
inability to stop the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. One such
segment, as transcribed by RT, involves the former NSA contractor's
response to a question from Williams on how to prevent further
attacks from Al Qaeda and other "non-traditional enemies"
in which Snowden suggested that United States had the proper
intelligence ahead of 9/11 but failed to act.
“You
know, and this is a key question that the 9/11 Commission considered.
And what they found, in the post-mortem, when they looked at all of
the classified intelligence from all of the different intelligence
agencies, they found that we had all of the information we needed as
an intelligence community, as a classified sector, as the national
defense of the United States to detect this plot,” Snowden said.
“We actually had records of the phone calls from the United States
and out. The CIA knew who these guys were. The problem was not that
we weren’t collecting information, it wasn’t that we didn’t
have enough dots, it wasn’t that we didn’t have a haystack, it
was that we did not understand the haystack that we have.”
Or,
as some have suggested over the years, it was not that "we"
did not understand the haystack. Quite the contrary. Which is
precisely why the attacks took place. But back to the accepted
narrative:
“The
problem with mass surveillance is that we’re piling more hay on a
haystack we already don’t understand, and this is the haystack of
the human lives of every American citizen in our country,” Snowden
continued. “If these programs aren’t keeping us safe, and they’re
making us miss connections — vital connections — on information
we already have, if we’re taking resources away from traditional
methods of investigation, from law enforcement operations that we
know work, if we’re missing things like the Boston Marathon
bombings where all of these mass surveillance systems, every domestic
dragnet in the world didn’t reveal guys that the Russian
intelligence service told us about by name, is that really the best
way to protect our country? Or are we — are we trying to throw
money at a magic solution that’s actually not just costing us our
safety, but our rights and our way of life?
This
goes to the fundamental argument that made Snowden blow the whistle
in the first place: by overreaching to a level not fathomed even by
the author of "1984", and by scrambling to collect every
piece of electronic communication and data exchange, or said
otherwise, shotgunning and focusing on the bulk instead of isolating
actionable data, what is the tradeoff?
We
do know that handing all private data to the NSA on a silver platter
has certainly resulted in an abuse of personal privacy by those
tasked with protecting Americans as we detailed in the past in "NSA
Agents Used Company Resources To Spy On Former Spouses." Who
knows how else this epic trove of private data is being abused by the
government for its own ulterior motives, while letting, as Snowden
suggested, critical information about the protection of US citizens -
the very premise behind the NSA's existence - slip through its
fingers.
Indeed,
the director of the NSA during Snowden’s stint there, Gen. Keith
Alexander, reportedly endorsed a method of intelligence gathering in
which the agency would collect quite literally all the digital
information it was capable of. “Rather than look for a single
needle in the haystack, his approach was, ‘Let’s collect the
whole haystack,’” one former senior US intelligence official
recently told the Washington Post. “Collect it all, tag it, store
it. . . .And whatever it is you want, you go searching for it.”
In
recent weeks, a leaked NSA document has affirmed that under the helm
of Alexander, the agency was told it should do as much as possible
with the information it gathers: "sniff it all, know it all,
collect it all, process it all and exploit it all,” according to
the slide. “They're making themselves dysfunctional by collecting
all of this data,” Bill Binney, a former NSA
employee-turned-whistleblower himself, told the Daily Caller last
year. Like Snowden, Binney has also argued that the NSA’s “collect
it all” condition with regards to intelligence gathering is deeply
flawed.
“They've
got so much collection capability but they can't do everything.
They're probably getting something on the order of 80 percent of what
goes up on the network. So they're going into the telecoms who have
recorded all of the material that has gone across the network. And
the telecoms keep a record of it for I think about a year. They're
asking the telecoms for all the data so they can fill in the gaps. So
between the two sources of what they've collected, they get the whole
picture,” Binney said.
Although
NBC neglected to play Mr. Snowden’s remarks to Williams in which he
questioned the efficiency of modern intelligence gathering under the
guise of being a counterterrorism tool, it did air on television
other remarks from the former contractor concerning the terrorist
attacks.
Stepping
back, this really is a debate about government efficiency, incentives
and motives. The biggest problem with the NSA, or rather its modus
operandi, according to Snowden is not that it does not have the
architecture to use the data already in its possession to isolate and
prevent incidents of terrorism: it did, and arguably it had enough
facts in its (and the CIA's) possession to prevent the September 11
attack, and it certainly was equipped with enough surveillance to
prevent the Boston Marathon bombing, yet it didn't. In the meantime,
the information grab is expanding until Big Brother, under the guise
of (failed) protection now knows everything about its citizens.
Simply said: this is merely government bloat in its most purest -
spending ever greater amounts of money to become increasingly more
inefficient, in the process destroying the concept of individual
privacy.
Or
as Snowden himself said it in a fragment that was aired,
"It’s
really disingenuous for the government to invoke and scandalize our
memories to sort of exploit the national trauma that we all suffered
together and worked so hard to come through to justify programs that
have never been shown to keep us safe, but cost us liberties and
freedoms that we don’t need to give up and our Constitution says we
don’t need to give up."
Sadly,
until the people themselves wake up to this conclusion which prompted
one person to speak up against a broken system, all of his efforts
will have been largely in vain.
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