NSA...Not So Accurate

The NY Times continues to lead on the NSA scandal, with their latest article heralding the jump from ever-better descriptions of the program to analyses of its effectiveness:

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. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of foreign-related phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy. [...]

President Bush has characterized the eavesdropping program, which focused on the international communications of some Americans and others in the United States, as a "vital tool" against terrorism; Vice President Dick Cheney has said it has saved "thousands of lives."

But the results of the program look very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret eavesdropping program and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive.

"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."

As I argued here, our problem was never that we lacked sufficient intelligence, but that we lacked the ability to process it. Hence the phrase "connecting the dots," we had the dots, they just weren't linked. So what the NSA program has done, apparently, is offer a few million more dots, the overwhelming majority of which simply get in the way of making those crucial connections. Feel safer?

Now, granted, much of the NY Times article smacks of a turf war between the FBI and the NSA. But the story sketched by the FBI agents is depressingly familiar. You had a data collection agency that drafted into service after 9/11. True to form, they stepped up the only thing they knew how to do: data collection. And, being a bureaucracy, they constantly pressed to expand their mandate, catching more and more innocents in the electronic dragnet and forcing more and more futile grunt work from harried FBI agents.

The story is archetypal, at least in conservative literature. This is what Republicans believe bureaucracies do. Dumbly expand. And so, over the past few decades, Democrats have come to agree that government agencies require oversight, internal competition, the utilization of some market mechanisms, and large scale accountability to prove effective. What a shame, then, that an assumedly important program like the NSA's would be left to bloat without the proven benefits of a healthy skepticism.

It's well possible that the massive, mostly useless resource expenditure required by the data mining has left Americans materially less safe, needlessly chewing up federal time, money, and personnel while darker threats lurked safely within the deluge. The question, as always, is not why we needed this program, but why we needed this program to be operated illegally, without any of the oversight, independent auditors, or performance analyses that could've ensured it was running with maximal efficiency and focus. The nation's security strikes me as a bit much to blindly entrust to the good judgment and sound instincts of unknown, unwatched bureaucrats, and I'd expect conservatives, of all people, to agree.