42 Terrorist Incidents Disrupted

Today's headlines contain a strong defense of NSA's various spy programs, most of which have already been divulged by Edward Snowden, traitor extraordinaire, and journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian.  The headline in the Wall Street Journal is White Hats vs. Black Hats. 

Gen Keith Alexander, Director NSA

General Keith Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency and Commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, spoke at the Black Hat USA 2013 hacker convention in Las Vegas on July 31.  Much of his talk centered on a vigorous defense of NSA's programs as essential to national security.

His main point, which I repeat in the title to this post, is that 42 terrorist incidents have been disrupted with the NSA's Prism program, which allows for access to servers of major firms including Google, Apple, Facebook, Skype and Twitter.  

Consider:  had Prism not been gathering the metadata which allowed the thwarting of those incidents, some if not all would have become acts of terror, presumably on American soil.  Think of the number of incidents over the past 20 years -- the 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center, the USS Cole, 9-11, the shoe bomber.  What does that total?  Perhaps 10 incidents, all of which are seared into the memory of Americans.  Had even half -- twenty -- of the thwarted incidents referred to by General Alexander, we would be a much different country today.  We would be frightened, paranoid, more heavily armed, and demanding of our political leaders to do something, anything, to stop future attacks.

No, what the NSA is doing is correct and needed.  What is of greater concern is the trend by other agencies to view NSA data (see New York Times, "Other Agencies Clamor for Data NSA Compiles"), which I will address in another post.

Why the NSA Surveills -- Possible Validation Today or this Week

A follow-up to Friday's post is in order, given the banner headlines on Drudge this morning:  "Planned Attack Big -- Strategically Significant."  Related articles cite an "awful amount of chatter" being gathered by intelligence agencies.

How do you think that the intel agencies collect, gather, and sift through this information?  It is by using the vacuum cleaner approaches to surveillance that are front and center to the current NSA controversy.  If an attack is avoided, or thwarted, because of these programs it will have been worth it.  This is exactly why we want NSA one step of ahead of international terrorists.

The terrorists are not necessarily using cellphones or email anymore.  They are using Twitter, Facebook, Skype, and more and are now communicating in code.  The number of emails, worldwide, amount over 500 billion per day.  The other means add another 100 billion.  Perhaps now the magnitude of the threat looks clearer.

What we Americans need to be certain is that we have safeguards about our own privacy chiseled in stone.   Also, no one wishes that a terrorist incident occur today to validate the headlines.  
But I've no  problem with giving intelligence agencies the authority to examine all worldwide communications to ensure that it doesn't happen.