FBI: NSA Wiretapping Ineffective

Via Kevin Drum, there's a New York Times article in which FBI sources say the NSA wiretapping led to a lot of dead ends:

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 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....

More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret 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.

Kevin downplays the story, partly because it sounds to him like bureaucratic infighting (probably true), and partly because "the effectiveness of the program just isn't a big issue".

He's right, up to a point: if the program was illegal, it was illegal no matter how effective or ineffective it was. Legality isn't the only issue, though, as far as public opinion is concerned. A lot of people (not Kevin Drum, and not I, but a sizable percentage of the public) are perfectly willing to give him a pass on illegality as long as what he's doing actually works. In the context of public opinion, if the NSA program isn't really contributing anything, that makes an enormous difference.

More importantly, the article suggests that it wasn't just ineffective but counter-productive. Ezra Klein makes the essential point here:

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.

And if that's the case--if it made Americans less safe rather than more safe--then this is a huge issue.

[That's all, folks]