World Affairs Brief, May 6, 2016 Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World.

Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief (http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com).

BINNEY SAYS NSA COLLECTING TOO MUCH DATA

NSA whistleblower William Binney says the “NSA is totally dysfunctional – it has too much data to detect threats.” Binney reveals that the agency is collecting everything, not just metadata, but his conclusion isn’t quite right. Citing a Reuters story RT said this,

By collecting all the data on everybody on the planet the NSA is just buried; they have too much data to be able to sort out and detect threats in advance, NSA veteran and whistleblower William Binney told RT.

RT: You say the National Security Agency (NSA) is rendered ineffective by the vast amounts of data it collects. Can we no longer rely on intelligence to prevent terror attacks?

William Binney: Well, they haven’t been preventing them so far. The point is that they have been consistently failing to stop these attacks. Originally General [Keith] Alexander claimed to the Senate Judiciary Committee that their programs have stopped 54 attacks in the US, but when he was challenged to prove that – that ended up being zero. The point is: they have too much data to be able to sort out and detect threats in advance. They have no opportunity to stop them.

What Binney doesn’t realize, having never been on the dark side of the NSA, is that the goal isn’t to stop terrorism at all, but to collect data on dissidents. And they do have the sophisticated processing and search algorithms to handle it all. The reason they don’t catch terrorists is that government sponsors terror attacks in order to justify continues restrictions on personal liberties and constitutional rights.