http://digg.com/2015/why-mass-surveillance-cant-wont-and-never-has-stopped-a-terrorist Excuse the Digg. I figure Schneier's worth it.
Schneier's a policy guy, and in my opinion, he gets it. Bamford is far more of a history/strategy geek and he says much the same thing. years before Snowden he pointed out that the intelligence community's approach to finding a needle in a haystack is to collect as much hay as humanly possible on the assumption that there's a needle in there somewhere. However, the actual needle-finding techniques have experienced zero advancement since the time of the OSS. There are better ways. What they mean is: Will Muslims turn in other Muslims? Haddad has a ready answer. “Not only would they, they do,” he says. “They’ve done it.”Ron Haddad is Dearborn’s chief of police, and he says he gets one question a lot when he travels around the country. “Someone will come up to me and put their finger in my face, and they’re already angry,” he says. “They say, ‘Will the people in your community report acts of terror to you?’“