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the most common complaint about the NSA is that they collect more than they can ever possibly analyze. Based on their charter, they're doing it exactly wrong. But they're not doing it based on their charter.

HOW IT'S SUPPOSED TO WORK

Igor Isis intends to blow up New York with a surplus Soviet warhead. He texts this to Jerry Jihad on O2 and the NSA siphons up literally everything on O2. Semantic Forest picks up the keywords "Warhead" "New York" and "blow up" and triggers an alarm. Then a human reads the conversation, sets Igor Isis and Jerry Jihad to surveillance, and everything they say is monitored by Jack Bauer and Ethan Hunt. Just as they're about to pick up the warhead, Delta Force swoops in and saves America thanks to those marvelous whiz kids at the NSA.

HOW IT ACTUALLY WORKS

The NSA siphons up every single data packet O2 has crossing their networks. There is no possible way any computer or human or combination can possibly parse any of it in realtime so Jerry and Igor's conversation goes unnoticed. Three months later, with millions dead and Manhattan a radioactive hole, the FBI finds Igor Isis' Facebook page and notices that he claimed he was going to blow up Manhattan. The FBI subpoenas his phone number and gets his records. They appeal to the NSA to give them everything they have on Igor and Jerry, and the NSA literally has everything. Then the NSA uses voiceprints and IPs and shit to find their way bak to Igor and Jerry's numbers on O2 and leafs back through their records to find the conversation about how they were going to blow up New York. They show this to the FBI, who then grabs the data on everyone they ever talked to. Several dozen people are swept up into CIA black sites, Guantanamo grows, and millions of people are still dead.

But the NSA gets to point out that their surveillance was successful.

This whole kerfuffle is over the fact that the FBI no longer needs to ask "mother may I" to see the phone records of dead, successful Jihadis. They can run their own search. theoretically the FBI might find something that might save lives or some shit but let's be real: Igor Isis could post a fuckin' Youtube video of himself with an ISIS flag and an AK and a fuckin' warhead in the background and the world wouldn't know about it until it was too late.

Your link isn't about intelligence gathering. It's about statistics. Statistically, 6% of terrorists are Islamic. but you don't need to find six percent. You need to find Dzhokar Tsarniev. The NSA's approach will tell you everything you've ever wanted to know about Dzhokar Tsarniev after he's blown up the Boston Marathon, not before.