The sad reality is that you cannot prevent all terrorism from ever happening, but if you can "play back" a person's interaction with foreign agents you can use that to bootstrap intelligence seeding on that foreign agents other contacts within the U.S. to root out that terror network before they strike again.
This is a weak and reactive strategy. The weakness is that you have to wait for an attack to occur. Once an attack occurs, you usually already know who is involved and that should be enough of a lead to go track down people through warrants. We knew Al Qaeda was behind the 1998 US Embassy bombings and the 2000 USS Cole bombing. The mistake we made was in not sharing information with the FBI and CIA after the NSA followed A.Q.
The other part of the article I was disappointed about was the mention of how the NSA (of all agencies) failed to prevent the Boston marathon bombing. Responsibility for domestic antiterrorism would properly fall with the FBI. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a permanent resident, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a naturalized citizen. All indications that I've heard were that Tamerlan essentially self-radicalized (possibly while abroad). Unless one thinks that the NSA is able to read minds of people in Chechnya I'm not sure what the author thinks could have been done.
I think the NSA is increasingly going to be held to a higher standard of working more closely with the FBI and CIA. I don't think moving forward it's going to be a black and white "NSA only does foreign intel, FBI only does domestic intel." That was the Achilles' Heel of 9/11. The NSA was wiretapping, following the hijackers around, and taking photos of them. That's the upper limit of surveillance and we already hit that, yet still failed to prevent it from happening because our intel was lacking the equivalent of a Corpus callosum.
But either way, blaming the NSA for missing an attack by domestic terrorists is almost completely missing the point of why we have the NSA, CIA, and FBI all as different agencies. As far as I'm aware no one from any of those agencies has ever claimed that systems as strong as PRISM or even 641A-type arrangements would 100% prevent terrorism, just like our police don't claim to be able to 100% prevent crime.
You don't exactly know how much we've gained by giving up our privacy, either. So you can't say it's worth it, and even if you could, that's a very subjective thing, so it's whatever people are comfortable sacrificing for some perceived value of security. I'd like to know details about the supposed attacks that have been prevented.
The purpose of the Constitution, at least in theory, is to prevent an uninformed citizenry from having to relinquish its rights, even when they feel it is okay to do so.
That same protection exists to keep the whims of a majority from taking away the rights of a minority. America doesn't have the best track record there (specifically referring to the Japanese Internment), but that doesn't mean that we should allow part and parcel sacrifices of liberty just because the citizenry is okay with it.
If the government is going to violate the fourth amendment, and the people are really that okay with it, then there's a constitutionally defined process for ratifying the Constitution. The bar for that is deservedly high.
This is a weak and reactive strategy. The weakness is that you have to wait for an attack to occur. Once an attack occurs, you usually already know who is involved and that should be enough of a lead to go track down people through warrants. We knew Al Qaeda was behind the 1998 US Embassy bombings and the 2000 USS Cole bombing. The mistake we made was in not sharing information with the FBI and CIA after the NSA followed A.Q.
The other part of the article I was disappointed about was the mention of how the NSA (of all agencies) failed to prevent the Boston marathon bombing. Responsibility for domestic antiterrorism would properly fall with the FBI. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a permanent resident, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a naturalized citizen. All indications that I've heard were that Tamerlan essentially self-radicalized (possibly while abroad). Unless one thinks that the NSA is able to read minds of people in Chechnya I'm not sure what the author thinks could have been done.
I think the NSA is increasingly going to be held to a higher standard of working more closely with the FBI and CIA. I don't think moving forward it's going to be a black and white "NSA only does foreign intel, FBI only does domestic intel." That was the Achilles' Heel of 9/11. The NSA was wiretapping, following the hijackers around, and taking photos of them. That's the upper limit of surveillance and we already hit that, yet still failed to prevent it from happening because our intel was lacking the equivalent of a Corpus callosum.
But either way, blaming the NSA for missing an attack by domestic terrorists is almost completely missing the point of why we have the NSA, CIA, and FBI all as different agencies. As far as I'm aware no one from any of those agencies has ever claimed that systems as strong as PRISM or even 641A-type arrangements would 100% prevent terrorism, just like our police don't claim to be able to 100% prevent crime.
You don't exactly know how much we've gained by giving up our privacy, either. So you can't say it's worth it, and even if you could, that's a very subjective thing, so it's whatever people are comfortable sacrificing for some perceived value of security. I'd like to know details about the supposed attacks that have been prevented.