Yes, the point is that after every attack, the intelligence agencies push the narrative in the media that it wasn't their fault for not stopping the attack, but the problem was that they just didn't have enough spying powers.
And usually everyone takes this as fact, and the government ends up giving them more powers, because "they are the experts, and if they say they the problem was that they needed more spying powers, then it must be true."
People need to push back against this narrative, and show everyone the facts. And the facts are that mass surveillance can't stop terrorist attacks [1]. The attacks that are usually prevented are those where the agencies received some strong tips that those people were planning something, and only then the surveillance becomes effective. But they wouldn't need mass surveillance powers for that. They just need a warrant (a regular one).
That's not the narrative here. The narrative here is that they did have the tools they needed to identify the threat in advance, but for reasons basically of venal nest-feathering corruption those tools were not used, and so the attack proceeded unhindered.
You've only got Bill Binney's word for it, to be sure. But let's not lose sight of the matter at hand in the rush to make points which are strongly held but tangential.
Binney is currently saying mostly the right things. That isn't to say that his story is especially believable. His team of heroes developed a system that "would have worked", had it been used. Yet he also tells us it has been used quite a bit since then, only with all the human rights protections stripped out. It seems as though "terrorism" still happens? Also, in future, we ought to build fewer super-powerful surveillance machines with "To Violate the Constitution, Press This" buttons.
If the system has facilities for classifying data by its "relevance", one would expect those to be used by those who fired Binney yet arranged for his system to be installed anyway. If the system relies on only "relevant data" ever being entered, then it's useless and always was.
I remember one of the main issues immediately post-9/11 was the fact that all the various agencies weren't sharing enough data. The NSA might have had this data but they weren't looking at it because it wasn't relevant to their goals at the time. Someone else might have been looking at those guys but didn't have any/relevant/actionable data. No one was sharing anything because of budget reasons, "Why waste my budget on someone else's investigation?"
All government agencies push that narrative. It's never their fault. They just need more power and a bigger budget.
There's only two fields that I can think of where failing gets you a promotion: government and banking. The latter is largely due to the involvement of government.
Edit: this only works for the upper echelons though. If a street level FBI agent screws up badly, they get reprimanded.
And usually everyone takes this as fact, and the government ends up giving them more powers, because "they are the experts, and if they say they the problem was that they needed more spying powers, then it must be true."
People need to push back against this narrative, and show everyone the facts. And the facts are that mass surveillance can't stop terrorist attacks [1]. The attacks that are usually prevented are those where the agencies received some strong tips that those people were planning something, and only then the surveillance becomes effective. But they wouldn't need mass surveillance powers for that. They just need a warrant (a regular one).
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/data_mining_f...