The Backfiring of the Surveillance State

Every
debate over expanded government surveillance power is invariably framed
as one of "security v. privacy and civil liberties" -- as though it's a
given that increasing the Government's surveillance authorities will
"make us safer." But it has long been clear that the opposite is
true. As numerous experts (such as Rep. Rush Holt) have
attempted, with futility, to explain, expanding the scope of raw
intelligence data collected by our national security agencies
invariably impedes rather than bolsters efforts to
detect terrorist plots. This is true for two reasons: (1) eliminating
strict content limits on what can be surveilled (along with enforcement
safeguards, such as judicial warrants) means that government agents
spend substantial time scrutinizing and sorting through communications
and other information that have nothing to do with terrorism;
and (2) increasing the quantity of what is collected makes it more
difficult to find information relevant to actual terrorism plots. As
Rep. Holt put it when arguing against the obliteration of
FISA safeguards and massive expansion of warrantless eavesdropping
power which a bipartisan Congress effectuated last year:

It
has been demonstrated that when officials must establish before a court
that they have reason to intercept communications -- that is, that they
know what they are doing -- we get better intelligence than through indiscriminate collection and fishing expeditions.

The
failure of the U.S. Government to detect the fairly glaring
Northwest Airlines Christmas plot -- despite years and years of
constant expansions of Surveillance State powers -- illustrates this
dynamic perfectly. As President Obama said yesterday, the Government -- just as was true for 9/11
-- had gathered more than enough information to have detected this
plot, or at least to have kept Abdulmutallab off airplanes and out of
the country. Yet our intelligence agencies -- just as was true for
9/11 -- failed to understand what they had in their possession. Why is
that? Because they had too much to process, including too much data
wholly unrelated to Terrorism. In other words, our panic-driven need
to vest the Government with more and more surveillance power every time
we get scared again by Terrorists -- in the name of keeping us safe --
has exactly the opposite effect. Numerous pieces of evidence prove
that.

Today in The Washington Post, that paper's CIA spokesman, David Ignatius, explains
that Abdulmutallab never made it onto a no-fly list because there are
simply too many reports of suspicious individuals being submitted on a
daily basis, which causes the system to be "clogged" -- overloaded --
with information having nothing to do with Terrorism. As a result,
actually relevant information ends up obscured or
ignored. Identically, Newsweek's Mike Isikoff and Mark Hosenball report
that U.S. intelligence agencies intercept, gather and store so many
emails, recorded telephone calls, and other communications that it's
simply impossible to sort through or understand what they have, quite
possibly causing them to have missed crucial evidence in their
possession about both the Fort Hood and Abdulmutallab plots:

This deluge of Internet traffic -- involving e-mailers whose true identity often is not apparent -- is one indication of the volume of raw intelligence U.S. spy agencies have had to sort through
as they have tried to assess Awlaki's influence in the West and
elsewhere, said the officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing
sensitive information. The large volume of messages also may
help to explain how agencies can become so overwhelmed with data that
sometimes it is difficult, if not impossible, to connect potentially
important dots.

Newsweek
adds that intelligence agencies likely possessed emails between accused
Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan and Yemeni-American cleric Anwar
al-Awlaki -- as well as recorded telephone calls between al-Awlaki and
Abdulmutallab -- but simply failed to analyze or understand what they
had intercepted.

The problem is never that the U.S.
Government lacks sufficient power to engage in surveillance,
interceptions, intelligence-gathering and the like. Long before 9/11
-- from the Cold War -- we have vested extraordinarily broad
surveillance powers in the U.S. Government to the point that we have
turned ourselves into a National Security and Surveillance State.
Terrorist attacks do not happen because there are too many
restrictions on the government's ability to eavesdrop and intercept
communications, or because there are too many safeguards and checks.
If anything, the opposite is true: the excesses of the Surveillance
State -- and the steady abolition of oversights and limits -- have made
detection of plots far less likely. Despite that, we have an
insatiable appetite -- especially when we're frightened anew -- to vest
more and more unrestricted spying and other powers in our Government,
which -- like all governments -- is more than happy to accept it.