An internal study showed that the NSA's warrantless spying programs did little to prevent terrorism. New York Times.

The NSA Seal. Public Domain. 

A declassified internal report showed that the NSA's warrantless surveillance program was hindered by secrecy and did little to prevent any terrorist attacks. New York Times. The report was released in 2009 and was recently declassified due to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. While much of the report remains classified and redacted there were a few new revelations about Stellar Wind surveillance program. First, FBI agents and CIA officers were unable to effectively use the information due to the secrecy surrounding the program. Second, FBI agents were told to scrutinize certain phone numbers that were "suspicious" and were given no other information. The FBI created a whole new category of investigation, a "threat assessment" to chase down these leads as opposed to opening a preliminary or full investigation. Third, the Stellar Wind program was largely ineffective. Between 2001 and 2004 just 1.2% of these FBI investigations led to the identification or deportation of a terrorist or the recruitment of an informant. No leads whatsoever were found between August 2004 and January 2006

My Comment:

Not a whole lot of new information here but what is there is important. It sounds like the program was hampered by the fact that is was of dubious legality. Everyone involved knew it at the time and understood there would be a backlash if it ever came out. That made them have to keep things so secret that they couldn't even properly communicate to the people actually doing the investigations. With no real idea where the information was coming from it was difficult for the FBI and the CIA to actually act on the information they received.

More damning then that is the fact that the internal investigations found that Stellar Wind was doing little to nothing to help catch terrorists. If the report is true and only 1.2% of these investigations went anywhere, then how can it be worth doing? Part of this may be due to the "success stories" being redacted, but I doubt it. 

From what I understand these programs just don't do all that much that normal investigations can't handle. If the failure rate of these programs is at or near 100%, why are we still doing them? If you really stretch it you could argue that violating the rights of millions or even billions of people is worth it if you could prevent a terror attack. I don't buy that argument, but it simply doesn't apply here. 

Which brings me to a story. Back in the day I decided to be a troll in my speech class in college. Everyone else did their persuasive speeches on the old college standards. You know, legalize weed, legalize gay marriage, and all the rest.  All the hippy dippy liberal crap you would expect. I went the other way with it. The topic I chose is whether or not torture was ever justified. I made an argument that under certain circumstances it could be. I used an example of a terrorist using a biological weapon that could wipe out most of humanity. Almost everyone agreed that if torturing a terrorist would save humanity it would a be a small price to pay. I then reduced the argument down to smaller scale terror attacks like 9/11 and some people still agreed with me.

At the end of the speech a few people had comments. Some thought that torture was wrong no matter what. Some wondered if I would participate in it. Some even said that I had convinced them torture could be justified to prevent a terror attack. A few people had questions but nobody even thought to answer the obvious one. Does torture work? To be honest back then I just assumed it did, and everyone else in the class did as well. But nobody questioned it. There is a lesson there somewhere, but I'll be damned if I know what it is.

Most people these days feel that torture does not, in fact, work. The best argument I have heard is that torture just doesn't work in these kinds of situations because people will just make up anything to make the pain stop. I don't know how true it is, but if it is it completely destroys any moral justification for using torture. After all, using a lesser evil to fight a greater evil is pointless if using the lesser evil does jack squat to actually prevent the greater evil.

And to bring it back the the NSA, it's clear that the lesser evil isn't stopping the greater evil. You could make a weak argument that violating the rights of millions of people might be less damaging then letting a massive terror attack happen,, but only if you actually prevent the terror attack. The NSA doesn't seem to be preventing anything, so the violation of everyone's privacy is even more outrageous.

My guess is that these programs are failing because the huge amount of data is just too much for human analysts to go through. The internet and the telecommunications sector creates massive amounts of data that are beyond human capabilities to analyze. Plus, with the massive amount of censorship and secrecy makes it very hard for the left hand to know what the right hand is doing...