"Secret without Reason and Costly without Accomplishment: Questioning the National Security Agency’s Metadata Program", Mueller & Stewart 2014; excerpts:
"As Dana Priest and William Arkin have documented in their the remarkable book, Top Secret America, by 2009 there were something like 1,074 federal government organizations and almost 2,000 private companies devoted to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence spread over more than 17,000 locations within the country. At least 263 of these were created or reorganized after 9/11. Collectively this apparatus launched far more covert operations in the aftermath of 9/11 than it had during the entire 45 years of the Cold War. 3
A comparison might be useful. Since 9/11, 53 cases have come to light of Islamist extremist terrorism, whether based in the United States or abroad, in which the United States itself has been, or apparently has been, targeted. 4 The total number of real terrorists, would-be terrorists, and putative terrorists populating this set of cases, excluding FBI and police undercover operatives, is less than 100. Thus, the United States has created or reorganized three entire counterterrorism organizations for every terrorist arrest or apprehension it has made of people plotting to do damage within the country.
In December 2013, two judges came to opposite conclusions about the 215 metadata program, and it is clear the program’s effectiveness figured importantly in their decisions. Judge Richard J. Leon, in finding the program was likely unconstitutional, noted that the government “does not cite a single instance” in which analysis of bulk metadata collection “actually stopped an imminent attack,” failed to present “any indication of a concrete danger,” and provided “no proof that the program prevented terrorist attacks.” 8 Eleven days later, Judge William Pauley, in approving the program, stressed in his first sentence that the world is “dangerous and interconnected” and went on to insist that the effectiveness of the data collection program “cannot seriously be disputed, ” noting that the “the Government has acknowledged several successes in Congressional testimony and in declarations.” 9 Meanwhile, a special Presidential group set up to review the NSA programs, while dwelling mostly on legal issues, also noted, in recommending the termination of 215, that information provided by the program “was not essential to preventing attacks and could readily have been obtained in a timely manner” otherwise, and that “there has been no instance in which NSA could say with confidence that the outcome would have been different” without the program. 10
Updating his opinion on “Face the Nation” on December 28, 2013, Hayden declared that the NSA had become “infinitely weaker” because of the disclosures.
If we are now to have a healthy debate about 215, NSA’s stupendous megadata program, it seems reasonable to suggest that debaters should be supplied with information about how much the program costs...It’s possible, however, that the figure for the program remains undisclosed in part because no one actually knows how much the program costs. That this phenomenon is widespread is suggested by Priest and Arkin. In researching their book, they discovered that the spending increases on counterterrorism in the aftermath of 9/11 often took place so fast and so chaotically that no one was able to keep a count of the costs. 21
...one must assess the program in context. It has been only one cog in the massive intelligence-gathering machine impelled by the trauma of 9/11. The trauma is certainly understandable. But the fears, and therefore the hasty and expensive actions they inspired, have clearly been substantially inflated. As anthropologist Scott Atran puts it, “Perhaps never in the history of human conflict have so few people with so few actual means and capabilities frightened so many.” 37 In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, recalls Rudy Giuliani, who was mayor of New York at the time, “anybody, any one of these security experts, including myself, would have told you on September 11, 2001, we’re looking at dozens and dozens and multiyears of attacks like this.” 38... operating under that apparently unanimous mentality, US intelligence extravagantly imagined that the number of trained al-Qaeda operatives in the United States was between 2,000 and 5,000. 40
Over the years, such thinking has been internalized and institutionalized in a great many ways, and it has proved to be notably resistant to counter-information. Indeed, officials often seem to live in what might be called “I think, therefore they are” denial. 41 Thus, on February 11, 2003, a year and a half after 9/11, FBI Director Robert Mueller assured the Senate Intelligence Committee that “the greatest threat is from al-Qaeda cells in the US that we have not yet identified.” He somehow judged the threat from those unidentified entities to be “increasing” and claimed to know that “al-Qaeda maintains the ability and the intent to inflict significant casualties in the US with little warning.” On February 16, 2005, he testified before the same committee that he remained “very concerned about what we are not seeing,” a sentence rendered in bold lettering in his prepared text. 42 By that time, however, an FBI report had concluded that, despite years of well-funded sleuthing, it had yet to uncover a single true al-Qaida sleeper cell in the United States. 43
In the process, information has been folded into a “Threat Matrix,” an itemized catalogue of all the “threats”—or more accurately “leads”—needing to be followed up. As Garrett Graff explains, the government pursues “upwards of 5,000 threats per day.” 45 Impelled by what some have called “The 9/11 Commission Syndrome”—an obsession with the career dangers in failing “to connect the dots”—it is in no one’s interest to cull the threats “because it was possible you’d cull the wrong threat and end up, after the next attack, at the green felt witness table before the next congressional inquiry.” 46 Consequently, the Threat Matrix “tracks all the unfolding terrorist plots and intelligence rumors” and is “filled to the brim with whispers, rumors, and vacuous, unconfirmed information.” 47 In result, “claims that ordinarily wouldn’t have made it past the intake agent, claims that wouldn’t even be written down weeks earlier, suddenly became the subject of briefs to the President in the Oval Office.” 48 Graff supplies an example. One entry in the Threat Matrix is crisply cited as “a threat from the Philippines to attack the United States unless blackmail money was paid.” It turns out that this entry was based on an e-mail that said, “Dear America. I will attack you if you don’t pay me 999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 dollars. MUHAHAHA.” 49
If, aided by the Threat Matrix, the government pursues some 5000 “threats” or leads each day, and if each lead takes an average of a half a week to investigate, the FBI has pursued some six million or more of them over the years since 9/11—a process that has led to, at the very most, a few hundred prosecutions, most of them on quite minor charges. 50
Moreover, whatever the ratio of needle to hay, living with the Threat Matrix seems to take a psychological toll on its daily readers. As Graff vividly describes the process, the Threat Matrix comes off as “a catalogue of horrors,” as the “daily looming prognoses of Armageddon,” and as “a seeming tidal wave of Islamic extremist anger that threatened to unhinge American society,” and it could become “all-consuming and paralyzing”—as one reader puts it, “Your mind comes to be dominated by the horrific consequences of low-probability events.” 51 In essence, it is like being barricaded in an apartment and listening only to the police radio. Or one reader offers another comparison: “Reading the Threat Matrix every day is like being stuck in a room listening to loud Led Zeppelin music,” and, after a while, you begin to suffer from “sensory overload” and become “paranoid” about the threat.” 52 Recalls former CIA Director George Tenet, “You could drive yourself crazy believing all or even half of what was in it.” 53 As Jack Goldsmith, another reader, stresses, “It is hard to overstate the impact that the incessant waves of threat reports have on the judgment of people inside the executive branch who are responsible for protecting American lives.” He quotes Tenet, “You simply could not sit where I did and read what passed across by desk on a daily basis and be anything other than scared to death about what it portended.” This, writes Goldsmith, captures “the attitude of every person I knew who regularly read the threat matrix.” 54
When asked in June 2013 at Senate hearings if NSA’s massive data-gathering programs were “crucial or critical” in disrupting terrorist threats, the agency’s head, General Keith Alexander, doggedly testified that in “dozens” of instances the databases “helped” or were “contributing”...After his testimony, Alexander provided Congress a list of terrorism cases in which his surveillance measures have helped to disrupt terrorist plots or to identify suspects. The list reportedly numbers 54—unsurprisingly, the list itself is classified. On the surface, this seems to be an amazingly small number for several years’ work. There have been hundreds of terrorism cases in the United States since 9/11. Some 53 of these, as noted earlier, have led to full-bore prosecutions for plotting to attack targets in the United States. 60 And there are dozens more that have led to prosecutions for sending, or plotting to send, support to terrorists overseas, while a few hundred have involved terrorism investigations that led to prosecutions on lesser charges. There have also been hundreds—or perhaps even thousands—of terrorism cases overseas outside of war zones. If the NSA programs were so valuable, one would think that investigators on just about every case would routinely run their information by the NSA.
...The experience at the FBI with NSA leads is likely relevant here. Explains Walter Pincus, if operatives at NSA, sorting through their 215 metadata collection or other sources, uncover “a questionable pattern” such as “calls to other suspect phones,” they send a report to the FBI for investigation. 61 In NSA this process has sometimes been called “We Track ‘Em, You Whack ‘Em.” 62 The FBI, then, is routinely supplied with what Graff calls “endless lists of ‘suspect’ telephone numbers.” When followed up, these “leads” virtually never go anywhere: of 5000 numbers passed along, only 10—two-tenths of one percent—“panned out enough for the bureau to bother” to get court permission to follow them up. At the FBI, the NSA tips are often called “Pizza Hut” leads because, following them up, FBI agents “inevitably end up investigating the local pizza delivery guy.” There is, in other words, nothing to “whack.” At one point, the generally diplomatic Robert Mueller bluntly told NSA director Alexander, “You act like this is some treasure trove; it’s a useless time suck.” An agent in the trenches puts it a bit less delicately: “You know how long it takes to chase 99 pieces of bullshit?” 63
Although the full array of cases remains classified, Senator Patrick Leahy has said that the notion that these cases represent disrupted plots is “plainly wrong.” Indeed, “they weren’t all plots and they weren’t all thwarted.” 68
Only one, it appears, relied on the 215 program in any significant way. 69 It is among the four disclosed ones, and it involves a San Diego cab driver from Somalia who has been convicted of sending the decidedly non-princely sum of $8,500 to help a designated terrorist group in Somalia fight Ethiopians who, with US support, had recently invaded the country. The government had been tapping his telephone for months, and Director Mueller appears to have singled out this case as the only one in which the collection of phone data had been “instrumental,” a word, of course, that is not as strong as “crucial” or “critical” or “necessary.” 70 Joyce says that an investigation of the potential case using 215 information that began in October 2007 “did not find any connection to terrorist activity,” but that there was a breakthrough when NSA connected a San Diego number with a suspicious contact outside the country using 215. 71 However, it is not clear they needed any sort of data bank to sort through. Says Senator Ron Wyden, investigators had all the information they needed to get a court order to investigate. 72
The second disclosed case seems to be even more trivial. It involves three Muslim men, all naturalized American citizens, one in Kansas City and two in New York. At the time of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, they decided they needed to fight for their “faith and community,” in the words of one of them. Four years later, one of the men was able to connect to two apparently experienced al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen. Hoping to join the fight in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Somalia, the American men sent money and equipment to their new friends in Yemen under the impression that these would be set aside for their military training. Over several months they sent thousands of dollars—one of them says it totaled more than $23,000—as well as watches, cold-weather gear, some Garmin GPS units, and a remote-controlled toy car. However, the recipients divided the physical loot among themselves and spent the money on (real) cars and as awards to families of Islamic martyrs. In 2008, the scam artists requested further payments of $45,000 which one of them planned to use to open an appliance store. They also suggested that the Americans were better suited to an operation in the United States and cajoled one of them into casing the New York Stock Exchange for a possible bombing—a “plot” that they never had any intention of carrying out, according to the testimony of one of them. The American did do a walk around the target, and then, several months later, submitted a one-page report on his adventure consisting of information that could have been gotten from Google maps and from tourist brochures. It was summarily trashed in disgust by his handlers. 74
In his June 2013 testimony, Joyce said identification in the case was made not through 215, but through “702 authority.” 75 At the same time, he raised interest, and then eyebrows, by dramatically proclaiming this to be a case “that was in the very initial stages of plotting to bomb the New York Stock Exchange.” However, when asked whether the plot was “serious,” Joyce deftly dodged the issue: “I think the jury considered it serious because they were all convicted.” As it happens, there were no jury trials: the three men all pleaded guilty and then only to providing support to terrorism, not to the NYSE plot (such as it was). According another official, FBI Deputy Director Joyce “misspoke.” 76
The third disclosed case involves an American who had done surveillance work (the value of which seems to have been fairly limited) for terrorist gunmen who killed 166 in a suicidal rampage in Mumbai, India, in 2008. He was later arrested as he was engaged in a plot to do terrorist damage in Denmark, a plot that was beset by many planning and financial difficulties at the time. According to ProPublica reporter Sebastian Rotella who has done extensive research and reporting on the case, British intelligence already had the American under surveillance.
Only the fourth disclosed case involves a serious potential for terrorism within the United States. This was the Zazi case of 2009 in which three Afghan-Americans received training in Pakistan and then returned to the United States plotting to set off bombs on the New York subway system. Joyce testified that a connection was made through “702 authority.” 78 But, as Justin Heilmann points out in a study of the episode and as others have more recently noted, the plot in the United States does not appear to have been disrupted so much by NSA data-dredgers but by standard surveillance procedures implemented after the British provided a hot tip about Zazi based on his e-mail traffic to a known overseas terrorist address that had long been under surveillance. 79...the plotters foolishly called attention to themselves by used stolen credit cards to purchase large quantities of potential bomb material thereby guaranteeing that the sales would be scrutinized and security camera information preserved. Moreover, even with his training and a set of notes at hand, Zazi, described by a step-uncle as “a dumb kid, believe me,” still apparently couldn’t figure it out, and he frantically contacted his overseas trainer for help several times."
"As Dana Priest and William Arkin have documented in their the remarkable book, Top Secret America, by 2009 there were something like 1,074 federal government organizations and almost 2,000 private companies devoted to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence spread over more than 17,000 locations within the country. At least 263 of these were created or reorganized after 9/11. Collectively this apparatus launched far more covert operations in the aftermath of 9/11 than it had during the entire 45 years of the Cold War. 3
A comparison might be useful. Since 9/11, 53 cases have come to light of Islamist extremist terrorism, whether based in the United States or abroad, in which the United States itself has been, or apparently has been, targeted. 4 The total number of real terrorists, would-be terrorists, and putative terrorists populating this set of cases, excluding FBI and police undercover operatives, is less than 100. Thus, the United States has created or reorganized three entire counterterrorism organizations for every terrorist arrest or apprehension it has made of people plotting to do damage within the country.
In December 2013, two judges came to opposite conclusions about the 215 metadata program, and it is clear the program’s effectiveness figured importantly in their decisions. Judge Richard J. Leon, in finding the program was likely unconstitutional, noted that the government “does not cite a single instance” in which analysis of bulk metadata collection “actually stopped an imminent attack,” failed to present “any indication of a concrete danger,” and provided “no proof that the program prevented terrorist attacks.” 8 Eleven days later, Judge William Pauley, in approving the program, stressed in his first sentence that the world is “dangerous and interconnected” and went on to insist that the effectiveness of the data collection program “cannot seriously be disputed, ” noting that the “the Government has acknowledged several successes in Congressional testimony and in declarations.” 9 Meanwhile, a special Presidential group set up to review the NSA programs, while dwelling mostly on legal issues, also noted, in recommending the termination of 215, that information provided by the program “was not essential to preventing attacks and could readily have been obtained in a timely manner” otherwise, and that “there has been no instance in which NSA could say with confidence that the outcome would have been different” without the program. 10
Updating his opinion on “Face the Nation” on December 28, 2013, Hayden declared that the NSA had become “infinitely weaker” because of the disclosures.
If we are now to have a healthy debate about 215, NSA’s stupendous megadata program, it seems reasonable to suggest that debaters should be supplied with information about how much the program costs...It’s possible, however, that the figure for the program remains undisclosed in part because no one actually knows how much the program costs. That this phenomenon is widespread is suggested by Priest and Arkin. In researching their book, they discovered that the spending increases on counterterrorism in the aftermath of 9/11 often took place so fast and so chaotically that no one was able to keep a count of the costs. 21
...one must assess the program in context. It has been only one cog in the massive intelligence-gathering machine impelled by the trauma of 9/11. The trauma is certainly understandable. But the fears, and therefore the hasty and expensive actions they inspired, have clearly been substantially inflated. As anthropologist Scott Atran puts it, “Perhaps never in the history of human conflict have so few people with so few actual means and capabilities frightened so many.” 37 In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, recalls Rudy Giuliani, who was mayor of New York at the time, “anybody, any one of these security experts, including myself, would have told you on September 11, 2001, we’re looking at dozens and dozens and multiyears of attacks like this.” 38... operating under that apparently unanimous mentality, US intelligence extravagantly imagined that the number of trained al-Qaeda operatives in the United States was between 2,000 and 5,000. 40
Over the years, such thinking has been internalized and institutionalized in a great many ways, and it has proved to be notably resistant to counter-information. Indeed, officials often seem to live in what might be called “I think, therefore they are” denial. 41 Thus, on February 11, 2003, a year and a half after 9/11, FBI Director Robert Mueller assured the Senate Intelligence Committee that “the greatest threat is from al-Qaeda cells in the US that we have not yet identified.” He somehow judged the threat from those unidentified entities to be “increasing” and claimed to know that “al-Qaeda maintains the ability and the intent to inflict significant casualties in the US with little warning.” On February 16, 2005, he testified before the same committee that he remained “very concerned about what we are not seeing,” a sentence rendered in bold lettering in his prepared text. 42 By that time, however, an FBI report had concluded that, despite years of well-funded sleuthing, it had yet to uncover a single true al-Qaida sleeper cell in the United States. 43
In the process, information has been folded into a “Threat Matrix,” an itemized catalogue of all the “threats”—or more accurately “leads”—needing to be followed up. As Garrett Graff explains, the government pursues “upwards of 5,000 threats per day.” 45 Impelled by what some have called “The 9/11 Commission Syndrome”—an obsession with the career dangers in failing “to connect the dots”—it is in no one’s interest to cull the threats “because it was possible you’d cull the wrong threat and end up, after the next attack, at the green felt witness table before the next congressional inquiry.” 46 Consequently, the Threat Matrix “tracks all the unfolding terrorist plots and intelligence rumors” and is “filled to the brim with whispers, rumors, and vacuous, unconfirmed information.” 47 In result, “claims that ordinarily wouldn’t have made it past the intake agent, claims that wouldn’t even be written down weeks earlier, suddenly became the subject of briefs to the President in the Oval Office.” 48 Graff supplies an example. One entry in the Threat Matrix is crisply cited as “a threat from the Philippines to attack the United States unless blackmail money was paid.” It turns out that this entry was based on an e-mail that said, “Dear America. I will attack you if you don’t pay me 999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 dollars. MUHAHAHA.” 49
If, aided by the Threat Matrix, the government pursues some 5000 “threats” or leads each day, and if each lead takes an average of a half a week to investigate, the FBI has pursued some six million or more of them over the years since 9/11—a process that has led to, at the very most, a few hundred prosecutions, most of them on quite minor charges. 50
Moreover, whatever the ratio of needle to hay, living with the Threat Matrix seems to take a psychological toll on its daily readers. As Graff vividly describes the process, the Threat Matrix comes off as “a catalogue of horrors,” as the “daily looming prognoses of Armageddon,” and as “a seeming tidal wave of Islamic extremist anger that threatened to unhinge American society,” and it could become “all-consuming and paralyzing”—as one reader puts it, “Your mind comes to be dominated by the horrific consequences of low-probability events.” 51 In essence, it is like being barricaded in an apartment and listening only to the police radio. Or one reader offers another comparison: “Reading the Threat Matrix every day is like being stuck in a room listening to loud Led Zeppelin music,” and, after a while, you begin to suffer from “sensory overload” and become “paranoid” about the threat.” 52 Recalls former CIA Director George Tenet, “You could drive yourself crazy believing all or even half of what was in it.” 53 As Jack Goldsmith, another reader, stresses, “It is hard to overstate the impact that the incessant waves of threat reports have on the judgment of people inside the executive branch who are responsible for protecting American lives.” He quotes Tenet, “You simply could not sit where I did and read what passed across by desk on a daily basis and be anything other than scared to death about what it portended.” This, writes Goldsmith, captures “the attitude of every person I knew who regularly read the threat matrix.” 54
When asked in June 2013 at Senate hearings if NSA’s massive data-gathering programs were “crucial or critical” in disrupting terrorist threats, the agency’s head, General Keith Alexander, doggedly testified that in “dozens” of instances the databases “helped” or were “contributing”...After his testimony, Alexander provided Congress a list of terrorism cases in which his surveillance measures have helped to disrupt terrorist plots or to identify suspects. The list reportedly numbers 54—unsurprisingly, the list itself is classified. On the surface, this seems to be an amazingly small number for several years’ work. There have been hundreds of terrorism cases in the United States since 9/11. Some 53 of these, as noted earlier, have led to full-bore prosecutions for plotting to attack targets in the United States. 60 And there are dozens more that have led to prosecutions for sending, or plotting to send, support to terrorists overseas, while a few hundred have involved terrorism investigations that led to prosecutions on lesser charges. There have also been hundreds—or perhaps even thousands—of terrorism cases overseas outside of war zones. If the NSA programs were so valuable, one would think that investigators on just about every case would routinely run their information by the NSA.
...The experience at the FBI with NSA leads is likely relevant here. Explains Walter Pincus, if operatives at NSA, sorting through their 215 metadata collection or other sources, uncover “a questionable pattern” such as “calls to other suspect phones,” they send a report to the FBI for investigation. 61 In NSA this process has sometimes been called “We Track ‘Em, You Whack ‘Em.” 62 The FBI, then, is routinely supplied with what Graff calls “endless lists of ‘suspect’ telephone numbers.” When followed up, these “leads” virtually never go anywhere: of 5000 numbers passed along, only 10—two-tenths of one percent—“panned out enough for the bureau to bother” to get court permission to follow them up. At the FBI, the NSA tips are often called “Pizza Hut” leads because, following them up, FBI agents “inevitably end up investigating the local pizza delivery guy.” There is, in other words, nothing to “whack.” At one point, the generally diplomatic Robert Mueller bluntly told NSA director Alexander, “You act like this is some treasure trove; it’s a useless time suck.” An agent in the trenches puts it a bit less delicately: “You know how long it takes to chase 99 pieces of bullshit?” 63
Although the full array of cases remains classified, Senator Patrick Leahy has said that the notion that these cases represent disrupted plots is “plainly wrong.” Indeed, “they weren’t all plots and they weren’t all thwarted.” 68
Only one, it appears, relied on the 215 program in any significant way. 69 It is among the four disclosed ones, and it involves a San Diego cab driver from Somalia who has been convicted of sending the decidedly non-princely sum of $8,500 to help a designated terrorist group in Somalia fight Ethiopians who, with US support, had recently invaded the country. The government had been tapping his telephone for months, and Director Mueller appears to have singled out this case as the only one in which the collection of phone data had been “instrumental,” a word, of course, that is not as strong as “crucial” or “critical” or “necessary.” 70 Joyce says that an investigation of the potential case using 215 information that began in October 2007 “did not find any connection to terrorist activity,” but that there was a breakthrough when NSA connected a San Diego number with a suspicious contact outside the country using 215. 71 However, it is not clear they needed any sort of data bank to sort through. Says Senator Ron Wyden, investigators had all the information they needed to get a court order to investigate. 72
The second disclosed case seems to be even more trivial. It involves three Muslim men, all naturalized American citizens, one in Kansas City and two in New York. At the time of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, they decided they needed to fight for their “faith and community,” in the words of one of them. Four years later, one of the men was able to connect to two apparently experienced al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen. Hoping to join the fight in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Somalia, the American men sent money and equipment to their new friends in Yemen under the impression that these would be set aside for their military training. Over several months they sent thousands of dollars—one of them says it totaled more than $23,000—as well as watches, cold-weather gear, some Garmin GPS units, and a remote-controlled toy car. However, the recipients divided the physical loot among themselves and spent the money on (real) cars and as awards to families of Islamic martyrs. In 2008, the scam artists requested further payments of $45,000 which one of them planned to use to open an appliance store. They also suggested that the Americans were better suited to an operation in the United States and cajoled one of them into casing the New York Stock Exchange for a possible bombing—a “plot” that they never had any intention of carrying out, according to the testimony of one of them. The American did do a walk around the target, and then, several months later, submitted a one-page report on his adventure consisting of information that could have been gotten from Google maps and from tourist brochures. It was summarily trashed in disgust by his handlers. 74
In his June 2013 testimony, Joyce said identification in the case was made not through 215, but through “702 authority.” 75 At the same time, he raised interest, and then eyebrows, by dramatically proclaiming this to be a case “that was in the very initial stages of plotting to bomb the New York Stock Exchange.” However, when asked whether the plot was “serious,” Joyce deftly dodged the issue: “I think the jury considered it serious because they were all convicted.” As it happens, there were no jury trials: the three men all pleaded guilty and then only to providing support to terrorism, not to the NYSE plot (such as it was). According another official, FBI Deputy Director Joyce “misspoke.” 76
The third disclosed case involves an American who had done surveillance work (the value of which seems to have been fairly limited) for terrorist gunmen who killed 166 in a suicidal rampage in Mumbai, India, in 2008. He was later arrested as he was engaged in a plot to do terrorist damage in Denmark, a plot that was beset by many planning and financial difficulties at the time. According to ProPublica reporter Sebastian Rotella who has done extensive research and reporting on the case, British intelligence already had the American under surveillance.
Only the fourth disclosed case involves a serious potential for terrorism within the United States. This was the Zazi case of 2009 in which three Afghan-Americans received training in Pakistan and then returned to the United States plotting to set off bombs on the New York subway system. Joyce testified that a connection was made through “702 authority.” 78 But, as Justin Heilmann points out in a study of the episode and as others have more recently noted, the plot in the United States does not appear to have been disrupted so much by NSA data-dredgers but by standard surveillance procedures implemented after the British provided a hot tip about Zazi based on his e-mail traffic to a known overseas terrorist address that had long been under surveillance. 79...the plotters foolishly called attention to themselves by used stolen credit cards to purchase large quantities of potential bomb material thereby guaranteeing that the sales would be scrutinized and security camera information preserved. Moreover, even with his training and a set of notes at hand, Zazi, described by a step-uncle as “a dumb kid, believe me,” still apparently couldn’t figure it out, and he frantically contacted his overseas trainer for help several times."