For years we have been told, that all these often secret programs that the government uses to spy on US citizens were essential to stopping terrorists. "They have stopped attacks and saved lives" we were told over and over again.
Think of all the deadly attacks the FBI missed after they were given warnings through traditional channels:
- Florida School Shooter
- Orlando Pulse Nightclub Shooter
- Boston Bombing
- Fort Hood Shooting
- Charleston Shooting
Yet suggestions that these programs where government spies on its citizens were ineffective because "it was like searching for a needle in a haystack" were derided as naive. We were told it was critical to give up a little bit of our privacy to preserve our safety.
Concerns that these programs could be abused by bad actors within the deep state for political purposes or worse were dismissed as conspiracy theories because of the integrity of the people that worked at our intelligence agencies and all the safeguards in place.
Now a former FBI Chief reveals the truth in The Hill:
"an exhaustive audit of the hundreds of thousands of leads generated since September 11, 2001 until the end of 2013, we determined that the program was credited with only one disruption since 9/11" (and the FBI received a tip about that disruption through traditional channels anyway)
"The FBI initially reported to Congress that the program had helped disrupt 53 terrorism plots, then reduced the number to 11 before quietly informing lawmakers there was just a single case "
"5 percent of upstream searches of NSA data were legally problematic"
"he sought in the summer of 2014 to get the FBI to reform the program out of concern it gave the FBI easy access to Americans’ telephone data, leaving it open to potential abuse while generating spurious connections between innocent people and bad actors."I believe that the program. . . was ripe for potential abuses," he said.
"he warned then-Director James Comey it was woefully ineffective in catching terrorists and needed to be modified."
This from Retired Special Agent Bassem Youssef, the chief of the FBI’s Communications Analysis Unit who supervised the FBI’s Section 215 warrantless phone surveillance program on a daily basis from 2005 through 2014. The program was revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013.
It is time to clean house at the FBI and the other intelligence agencies. We cannot have a situation continue where these agencies not only lie to the American people, but also to the Congressional oversight committees who they report to.