Jan 17, 2006 
Today’s New York Times story by Lowell Bergman, Eric Lichtblau, Scott Shane and Don van Natta Jr. — “Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends,” is not the first to question whether the once-secret NSA wiretapping program was effective. On January 4 Mark Hosenball posted a Newsweek web exclusive that asked the same question — illegal or not, did it work?
Hosenball writes,
Did the National Security Agency’s controversial eavesdropping program really help to detect terrorists or avert their plots? Administration officials have suggested to media outlets like The New York Times—which broke the story—that the spying played a role in at least two well-publicized investigations, one in the United Kingdom and one involving a plan to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge.
But before the NSA’s warrantless spying program became public, government spokesmen had previously cited other intelligence and legal tactics as having led to major progress in the same investigations. In the Brooklyn Bridge case, officials indicated that the questioning of a captured Al Qaeda leader had led to investigative breakthroughs in Ohio. In the British case, Justice Department officials told NEWSWEEK a year ago that investigators had made progress by using a controversial provision of the Patriot Act which allows authorities to monitor potentially suspicious activities in public libraries.
In other words, if next week we learn the White House has been getting intelligence from a Ouija board, expect the Bushies to claim the Ouija board helped save the Brooklyn Bridge.
NEWSWEEK reported extensively on these cases when government investigations were coming to fruition. In both instances, officials originally indicated that key investigative developments came from sources other than NSA electronic eavesdropping—then still a closely guarded secret.
And if we’d had that Ouija board before 9/11 — the WTC towers would be standing today.
In the New York Times story linked above, Bergman et al. report that the FBI found the NSA “intelligence” to be a nuisance — “tips” that required a lot of legwork to check out but led to dead ends.
F.B.I. field agents, who were not told of the domestic surveillance programs, complained that they often were given no information about why names or numbers had come under suspicion. A former senior prosecutor who was familiar with the eavesdropping programs said intelligence officials turning over the tips “would always say that we had information whose source we can’t share, but it indicates that this person has been communicating with a suspected Qaeda operative.” He said, “I would always wonder, what does ’suspected’ mean?”
“The information was so thin,” he said, “and the connections were so remote, that they never led to anything, and I never heard any follow-up.”
More critically, Bergman et al. reveal that the NSA did too snoop on communications that were entirely within the United States.
Officials who were briefed on the N.S.A. program said the agency collected much of the data passed on to the F.B.I. as tips by tracing phone numbers in the United States called by suspects overseas, and then by following the domestic numbers to other numbers called. …
… in bureau field offices, the N.S.A. material continued to be viewed as unproductive, prompting agents to joke that a new bunch of tips meant more “calls to Pizza Hut,” one official, who supervised field agents, said.
I’m assuming nobody was ordering pizza from Pakistan.
The New York Times article raises several more questions. One, was the NSA program in fact counterproductive because it wasted FBI time and resources playing Trivial Pursuit?
In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.
But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.
F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators.
And, of course, we are still arguing over the legality of warrantless snooping on American citizens. One argument from the Right is that the nature of data mining makes warrants too cumbersome. On last night’s Hardball someone with expertise in FISA regulations (transcript not yet available) said that it has always been understood that warrants are not necessary for keyword searches, because they don’t involve people. But once the keyword search identifies a “U.S. person,” then law clearly requires a warrant. Seems to me that the process of applying for a warrant, as time consuming as that might be, would have forced the NSA to distinguish dead ends from genuine risks, thereby saving the FBI considerable time. Sort of the old “measure twice, cut once” principle.
Further, it is obvious the NSA program was not limited, or controlled, as the White House claims. We’re being lied to again. I’m shocked, shocked I tell you …
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