What’s the evidence mass surveillance works? Not much
Officials are again pointing to the need for mass surveillance to take down terrorists. Here’s what we know about how well it works.
Current and former government officials have been pointing to the terror attacks in Paris as justification for mass surveillance programs. CIA Director John Brennan accused privacy advocates of "hand-wringing" that has made "our ability collectively internationally to find these terrorists much more challenging." Former National Security Agency and CIA director Michael Hayden said, "In the wake of Paris, a big stack of metadata doesn't seem to be the scariest thing in the room."
Ultimately, it's impossible to know just how successful sweeping surveillance has been, since much of the work is secret. But what has been disclosed so far suggests the programs have been of limited value. Here's a roundup of what we know.
An internal review of the Bush administration's warrantless program – called Stellarwind – found it resulted in few useful leads from 2001–2004, and none after that. New York Times reporter Charlie Savage obtained the findings through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and published them in his new book, Power Wars: Inside Obama's Post–9/11 Presidency:
In an endnote, Savage then added:
In 2014, the President's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies analyzed terrorism cases from 2001 on, and determined that the NSA's bulk collection of phone records "was not essential to preventing attacks." According to the group's report,
Another 2014 report by the nonprofit New America Foundation echoed those conclusions. It described the government claims about the success of surveillance programs in the wake of the 9/11 attacks as "overblown and even misleading."
Edward Snowden's leaks about the scope of the NSA's surveillance system in the summer of 2013 put government officials on the defensive. Many politicians and media outlets echoed the agency's claim that it had successfully thwarted more than 50 terror attacks.ProPublica examined the claim and found "no evidence that the oft-cited figure is accurate."
The NSA has publicly discussed four cases, and just one in which surveillance made a significant difference. That case involved a San Diego taxi driver named Basaaly Moalin, who sent $8,500 to the Somali terrorist group al-Shabab. But even the details of that case are murky. From the Washington Post:
Also in the months after the Snowden revelations, the Justice Department said publicly that it had used warrantless wiretapping to gather evidence in a criminal case against another terrorist sympathizer, which fueled ongoing debates over the constitutionality of those methods. From the New York Times:
Local police departments have also acknowledged the limitations of mass surveillance, as Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis did after the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013. Federal authorities had received Russian intelligence reports about bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, but had not shared this information with authorities in Massachusetts or Boston. During a House Homeland Security Committee hearing, Davis said,