Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Choke Point

Since the discovery of warrantless NSA domestic spying, I had been wondering how in the world they could possibly begin to follow up on all the leads this program would generate.

The New York Times answers that question today. They overloaded the FBI with tips, and according to the FBI, forced the FBI to chase down thousands of useless leads that wasted countless valued FBI counter terrorism man-hours. From The New York Times:


"We'd chase a number, find it's a schoolteacher with no indication they've ever been involved in international terrorism - case closed," said one former F.B.I. official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. "After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration."

That sounds pretty close to assumptions I had made about the program when I first heard about it. I knew there had to be a choke point in the process of investigating the leads and I figured it would be when the leads were turned over to field agents and this seems to be the case.

How exactly is this making us safer?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Lovely to see all OH's R Congressionals and Senators wrap themselves in fear mongering and flags (especially Schmidt... that woman can dress) today in Cols Dispatch "In their own words"... hope they choke on them one day as their constitution undermining progeny burn Washington in the name of defending America.