Aff document Map
Superfluous data prevents the government from stopping actual terror plots
Download 0.86 Mb.
|
Superfluous data prevents the government from stopping actual terror plotsGreenwald, 14 (Glenn Greenwald is a journalist, constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times best-selling books on politics and law. His most recent book, No Place to Hide, is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. Prior to his collaboration with Pierre Omidyar, Glenn’s column was featured at The Guardian and Salon. He was the debut winner, along with Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work on the abusive detention conditions of Chelsea Manning. For his 2013 NSA reporting, he received the George Polk award for National Security Reporting; the Gannett Foundation award for investigative journalism and the Gannett Foundation watchdog journalism award; the Esso Premio for Excellence in Investigative Reporting in Brazil (he was the first non-Brazilian to win), and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award. Along with Laura Poitras, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. The NSA reporting he led for The Guardian was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service – what a baller, “No Place to Hide”, http://www.simoleonsense.com/snowden-the-nsa-and-the-u-s-surveillance-state/ - some dude transcribed parts of the book here so swag, ak.) “Surveillance cheerleaders essentially offer only one argument in defense of mass surveillance: it is only carried out to stop terrorism and keep people safe. Indeed, invoking an external threat is a historical tactic of choice to keep the population submissive to government powers.” “That same month, Obama’s hand-picked advisory panel (composed of, among others, a former CIA deputy director and a former White House aide, and convened to study the NSA program through access to classified information) concluded that the metadata program “was not essential to preventing attacks and could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using conventional [court] orders.” “The record is indeed quite poor. The collect-it-all system did nothing to detect, let alone disrupt, the 2012 Boston Marathon bombing. It did not detect the attempted Christmas-day bombing of a jetliner over Detroit, or the plan to blow up Times Square, or the plot to attack the New York City subway system—all of which were stopped by alert bystanders or traditional police powers. It certainly did nothing to stop the string of mass shootings from Aurora to Newtown. Major international attacks from London to Mumbai to Madrid proceeded without detection, despite involving at least dozens of operatives.” “In fact, mass surveillance has had quite the opposite effect: it makes detecting and stopping terror more difficult. Democratic Congressman Rush Holt, a physicist and one of the few scientists in Congress, has made the point that collecting everything about everyone’s communications only obscures actual plots being discussed by actual terrorists. Directed rather than indiscriminate surveillance would yield more specific and useful information.” “American dying in a terrorist attack is infinitesimal, considerably less than the chance of being struck by lightning. John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism, explained in 2011: “The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It’s basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year.” More American citizens have “undoubtedly” died “overseas from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses,” the news agency McClatchy reported, “than from terrorism.” “After the trouble-free Olympics, Stephen Walt noted in Foreign Policy that the outcry was driven, as usual, by severe exaggeration of the threat. He cited an essay by John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart in International Security for which the authors had analyzed fifty cases of purported “Islamic terrorist plots” against the United States, only to conclude that “virtually all of the perpetrators were ‘incompetent, ineffective, unintelligent, idiotic, ignorant, unorganized, misguided, muddled, amateurish, dopey, unrealistic, moronic, irrational, and foolish.’” Mueller and Stewart quoted from Glenn Carle, former deputy national intelligence officer for transnational threats, who said, “We must see jihadists for the small, lethal, disjointed and miserable opponents that they are,” and they noted that al-Qaeda’s “capabilities are far inferior to its desires.” Not enough resources to watch everyone – undermines actual counter surveillanceVolz, 14 (Dustin, The National Journal, “Snowden: Overreliance on Mass Surveillance Abetted Boston Marathon Bombing: The former NSA contractor says a focus on mass surveillance is impeding traditional intelligence-gathering efforts—and allowing terrorists to succeed”, October 20, 2014, ak.) Edward Snowden on Monday suggested that if the National Security Agency focused more on traditional intelligence gathering—and less on its mass-surveillance programs—it could have thwarted the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. The fugitive leaker, speaking via video to a Harvard class, said that a preoccupation with collecting bulk communications data has led to resource constraints at U.S. intelligence agencies, often leaving more traditional, targeted methods of spying on the back burner. "We miss attacks, we miss leads, and investigations fail because when the government is doing its 'collect it all,' where we're watching everybody, we're not seeing anything with specificity because it is impossible to keep an eye on all of your targets," Snowden told Harvard professor and Internet freedom activist Lawrence Lessig. "A good example of this is, actually, the Boston Marathon bombings." Snowden said that Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were pointed out by Russian intelligence to U.S. officials prior to the bombings last year that killed three and left hundreds wounded, but that such actionable intelligence was largely ignored. He argued that targeted surveillance on known extremists and diligent pursuit of intelligence leads provides for better counterterrorism efforts than mass spying. "We didn't really watch these guys and the question is, why?" Snowden asked. "The reality of that is because we do have finite resources and the question is, should we be spending 10 billion dollars a year on mass-surveillance programs of the NSA to the extent that we no longer have effective means of traditional [targeting]?" Anti-spying activists have frequently argued that bulk data collection has no record of successfully thwarting a terrorist attack, a line of argument some federal judges reviewing the NSA's programs have also used in their legal reviews of the activities. Snowden's suggestion—that such mass surveillance has not only failed to directly stop a threat, but actually makes the U.S. less safe by distracting resource-strapped intelligence officials from performing their jobs—takes his criticism of spy programs to a new level. "We're watching everybody that we have no reason to be watching simply because it may have value, at the expense of being able to watch specific people for which we have a specific cause for investigating, and that's something that we need to look carefully at how to balance," Snowden said. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 0.86 Mb. Share with your friends:
|