A report
released Monday suggests a National Security Agency domestic
surveillance program “has had no discernible impact on preventing acts
of terrorism.” The New America Foundation, a Washington-based
nonprofit, analyzed 225 terrorism cases in the United States since Sept.
11, 2001, and says that the telephone metadata collection program has
“only the most marginal of impacts on preventing terrorist-related
activity.” The NSA’s telephone metadata program, the report says,
only helped initiate 1.8 percent of the cases reviewed. The agency’s
programs monitoring foreign citizens outside the United States helped
initiate 4.4 percent of those terrorism cases. The report says that President Obama, NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander
and even members of Congress, including House Intelligence Committee
Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), have charged that the program has helped
stop and thwart at least 50 terrorist plots around the world. Those claims, New America says, are “overblown and even misleading.” In
three terrorism cases, New America found government officials might
have “exaggerated” the role of the NSA and the significance of threats,
including one to blow up the New York Stock Exchange. “The overall
problem for U.S. counterterrorism officials is not that they need
vaster amounts of information from the bulk surveillance programs, but
that they don’t sufficiently understand or widely share the information
they already possess that was derived from conventional law enforcement
and intelligence techniques,” the report says. Obama, meanwhile,
discussed a report that examines the NSA’s reach with lawmakers last
week. The White House also announced Obama will unveil reforms to the
agency on Friday. The Hill
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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