

PRISM Stopped Najibullah Zazi From Blowing Up Backpacks in the Subway - daegloe
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/prism-najibullah-zazi-subway-nsa.html

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mindcrime
OK, check out this bit:

 _" And so when that bell rings, they say, 'Hey, they hardly ever use this
account, but it's associated with Rashid Rauf, who is al Qaeda's master bomb
maker, behind the plot to blow up all the airplanes, 'Who's he talking to?'
And when they find out the other IP address on the other end resolves to
Aurora, Colo., outside Denver, it connects them to Zazi, it takes them to the
plot to blow up the New York subways, it's all prevented. That's how a program
like this is supposed to work."_

That, to me, _weakens_ the government's argument that they need to collect all
this data indiscriminately using PRISM. They had an email address that was
associated with a known Al-Qaeda bombmaker... ok, great, go get a warrant and
get permission to pull all emails sent to or from that address. That would
have caught this guy just the same! Which takes us back to what I said before,
which is that analyzing activity between random people isn't going to do
anything to help catch a terrorist.

Either you know somebody is "on the radar" or you don't. If two (or more)
people are plotting with each other to explode something, you can analyze the
metadata about their calling and emailing habits until the cows come home, and
it's not going to tell you that they're planning to plant a bomb if none of
them are current suspects. Now if they reach out to a known bombmaker or
militant group or something, then OK, that would tell you something. But, in
that case, you just go get a warrant.

The one argument I could _almost_ see for this PRISM thing to make a little
bit of sense, is this:

If there are too many "suspected terrorist" phone numbers and email addresses
for the Verizon's and AT&T's and GMails of the world to monitor constantly, in
real time, and sending an alert to the NSA if there is activity. So by getting
a raw dump of everything, the NSA can then run their analysis using their
super-duper fancy schmancy quantum computer, or whatever they have (probably
just a huge Hadoop cluster, but who knows) to mine for the "hits".

But even if that were the case, I'd still consider this PRISM thing to be way
over-reaching and improper.

