The National Security Agency considered abandoning its secret program to collect and store American calling records in the months before leaker Edward Snowden revealed the practice, current and former intelligence officials say, because some officials believed the costs outweighed the meager counterterrorism benefits.
After the leak and the collective surprise around the world, NSA leaders strongly defended the phone records program to Congress and the public, but without disclosing the internal debate.
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Soon after Snowden’s revelations, Alexander said that the N.S.A.’s surveillance programs have stopped “fifty-four different terrorist-related activities.” Most of these were “terrorist plots.” Thirteen involved the United States. Credit for foiling these plots, he continued, was partly due to the metadata program, intended to “find the terrorist that walks among us.”
President Obama also quantified the benefits of the metadata program. That June, in a press conference with Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, Obama said, “We know of at least fifty threats that have been averted because of this information.” He continued, “Lives have been saved.”
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He [Senator Patrick Leahy, of Vermont] cited a statement by Alexander’s deputy that “there’s only really one example of a case where, but for the use of Section 215 bulk phone-records collection, terrorist activity was stopped.” “He’s right,” Alexander said.
The case was that of Basaaly Moalin, a Somali-born U.S. citizen living in San Diego. In July, 2013, Sean Joyce, the F.B.I.’s deputy director at the time, said in Senate-committee testimony that Moalin’s phone number had been in contact with an “Al Qaeda East Africa member” in Somalia. The N.S.A., Joyce said, was able to make this connection and notify the F.B.I. thanks to Section 215. That February, Moalin was found guilty of sending eighty-five hundred dollars to the Shabaab, an extremist Somali militia with ties to Al Qaeda. “Moalin and three other individuals have been convicted,” Joyce continued. “I go back to what we need to remember, what happened in 9/11.” At the same hearing, Senator Dianne Feinstein, of California, talked about “how little information we had” before 9/11. “I support this program,” she said, referring to Section 215. “They will come after us, and I think we need to prevent an attack wherever we can.”
In the thirteen years that have passed since 9/11, the N.S.A. has used Section 215 of the Patriot Act to take in records from hundreds of billions of domestic phone calls. Congress was explicit about why it passed the Patriot Act—despite concerns about potential effects on civil liberties, it believed that the law was necessary to prevent another attack on the scale of 9/11. The government has not shown any instance besides Moalin’s in which the law’s metadata provision has directly led to a conviction in a terrorism case. Is it worth it?
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This week the remains of the laptop used by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, pointlessly but symbolically destroyed by Guardian editors under the eyes of GCHQ, have been put on display at the V&A, a museum of art and design.
It forms part of the All of this Belongs to You exhibition, open until 19 July. Through a series of interventions and installations, it aims to examine “the role of public institutions in contemporary life” and to ask “what it means to be responsible for a national collection”. It raises questions about democracy, as we run up to the election, and about institutional and curatorial practice.
V&A curator, Kieran Long, said that they gained the confidence to show the remains when it was recalled that the museum had broken objects in its own collection, which had been preserved because of the stories they told rather than the artefact’s intrinsic beauty or interest. Thus it now forms part of a display on technology, secrecy and privacy. [...]
