William Safire in the NYT reveals that:
Worst of all, the N.S.A. will soon be revealed to be a huge vacuum cleaner aimed to listen to or look at key words but with no way to go through most of the millions of communications it does collect every day. Hold your hand as high as you can above your head to indicate how much data our present system collects. Then drop your hand to your knee — that’s how much gets translated into English. Then point at your ankle: that’s how much goes to our intelligence analysts at the C.I.A. in time to be useful. As far as F.B.I. counterintelligence in the U.S. is concerned, that’s in your little toe.
I’m glad he believes that an independent commission will be formed to evaluate the pre-9/11 intelligence failures, especially if it is focused on forward-looking changes rather than finger-pointing. As he says, “How do we use this hindsight to gain foresight? Neither by leak warfare among scared bureaucracies nor by their triumphant seizures of incoming hoodlums accused of ‘planning’ to build a panic bomb.”
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