By David K. Shipler
In the rush
after the Paris attacks to step up surveillance, the usual arguments are being
heard on one side about violations of civil liberties, and, on the other, about
obstacles to monitoring because of what CIA director John Brennan derides as “hand-wringing”
over government intrusion. But there is a less visible problem, often mentioned
by former intelligence officials: Excessive, unfocused surveillance has
produced floods of information beyond what the professionals can digest and
analyze.
At an
illuminating panel in Washington two months ago, three former officials of the
National Security Agency—Thomas Drake, William Binney, and J. Kirk Wiebe—made
precisely that point, and if you talk to others who have been in the business, many
of them will tell you the same thing. The petabytes of data that have been
vacuumed up almost indiscriminately since 9/11 are stored untranslated, unread,
and unsifted in digital files, well off the radar of the agents who are charged
with spotting radicals before they commit the next atrocity.
The
American Civil Liberties Union, whose overriding goal is to protect
constitutional rights, came up with the perfect metaphor after the Patriot Act
diluted the Fourth Amendment’s protections in 2001: You don’t find a needle in
a haystack by increasing the size of the haystack. Yet expanding the haystack
is what was done, and is what is now being proposed.
