There's a serious misunderstanding by the American people that the NSA concerns itself with terrorism/counterterrorism. It does not. It's a technical agency who attempts to collect as much information as possible. It provides some information to some other agencies some of the time.
Other agencies are in charge of counter terrorism intelligence such as the FBI, DHS and NCTC.
Disclosures about their global surveillance program had much more to do with human intelligence (mass propaganda), industrial espionage, and diplomatic intelligence than terrorism.
The media seriously misinformed the American people about the duties and prerogatives on the NSA, mostly to link the NSA and its excesses to something equally controversial, however, untrue.
Anyway walking back from that line of reasoning: yes. Insurgencies around the world have had their operational security studied for decades and they are very sanitary wrt carrying around cellphones that have their batteries in, etc.
Of course it does, Counterterrorism is one of many missions it must undertake. It's not like the NSA was set up during the Cold War when terrorism was barely a policy making blip on anybody's radar or anything.
In other words, Spy Agency does Spying, news at 11.
The NSA isn't an antiterrorism agency. It's a general purpose spy agency. If you thought that it only was collecting meta data for terrorists purposes, that's on you. That was never the purpose of the agency and I'm not really sure how anyone could believe it was. What did you think they were doing during the Cold War?
It's also common knowledge that allies spy on each. America's biggest counter-intelligence threat is actually Israel. They are spying on us all the time.
However for posterity it's clear that the NSA is not about terrorism:
* The Inspector General Report on the Boston Bombings and the US's failure to discover them do not talk about the NSA (except to mention it in passing just two times). "We focused our review on the entities that were the most likely to have had information about Tamerlan Tsarnaev prior to the bombings – the FBI, the CIA, DHS, and NCTC, which maintains the U.S. government’s database of classified identifying and substantive derogatory information on known or suspected terrorists."
* The NSA's mission statement itself is "The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) leads the U.S. Government in cryptology that encompasses both Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Information Assurance (IA) products and services, and enables Computer Network Operations (CNO) in order to gain a decision advantage for the Nation and our allies under all circumstances."
* The NSA's actions regarding the Natanz nuclear processing facility, capturing data from German officials during the Eurozone crisis, of off shore oil drilling bids from Brazilian PETROBOL, programs such as HACIENTA that specifically target countries, blatant references to political and financial targets, etc
* Programs such as QUEEN, ORCHESTRA, MINERVA, BIRDSONG/BADGER/GATEWAY/SLIPSTREAM, JTRIG, literature and research on social contagions and PsyOps (related to recent recent USAID Cuban Twitter project and Lincoln Group)
Together these tell us that the NSA is an arm of us finance, espionage, sabotage and influence/propoganda targeting political upheaval in target nations.
It is a misconception that the NSA is an anti-terrorism agency.
It is a general signal intelligence agency. It's job is the gather as much foreign intelligence as possible. And that sure includes:Like tracking the intricacies of various global markets, cultural movements, politicians, judges, activists and other influencers in society. Like basically an opportunity to see everybody at the table's cards (including your friends) in order to maximize power?
Where you go wrong is assuming that means they have some dastardly plan to subvert global democracy.
The government just really wants good intel. They want to know if Russian sanctions are working. They want to know if N. Korea is really just bullshiting or do they mean it. They want to know how much longer with Germany prop up Southern Europe. They want to know if Cuba is serious about opening up trade. They want to know if some French scientist is about to develop software that beats US electronic warfare defenses on their AEGIS destroyers.
The NSA isn't focused exclusively on terrorism. It has ~40k employees who work on a wide range of areas, drug cartels, human trafficking, money laundering, counter intelligence, espionage, and hundreds of others. It's mighty presumptuous for people not "in the know" to speak on what is and isn't valuable to the NSA's missions.
As for terrorists, if someone were a skilled terrorist their entire life, they probably wouldn't live digital traces within the US. But this isn't the case; people become terrorists, and some of those become skilled terrorists. There is immense value in having intelligence on people before they become a terrorist and needless to say, before they hone their tradecraft and drop from the grid.
That's ironic since counterterrorism[1] is the supposed primary mission of the NSA surveillance enabled by FISC / PATRIOT Act.
[1] Provided that you think a simple Googling of "backpack" and "pressure cooker" in the days following the Boston Marathon Attack implies a probable link to terrorism.
The NSA does a lot more than just fight terrorism and of course the US invests a huge amount of money in mitigating the impact of other risks like natural disasters. They have to look at all these different threats and divvy up the money accordingly.
NSAs job isn't just to prevent terrorist attacks, it's also to gather and analyse information for the US government and to keep US communications secure. I don't know whether or not they're "cost effective", but I don't think anyone would doubt that they've given the US a huge strategic advantage.
I don't know where you got this idea. The NSA is known for being close to useless in terrorism matters and champion of industrial espionage and spying on political leaders.
I understand the point you're making, I just don't think it's obvious that the NSA is unimportant. As well as detecting terrorism, they may well be doing a lot of other things to protect the us against then machinations of others e.g. Russia and china.
Also, don't underestimate terrorism. Over decades, the IRA did a lot to disrupt the UK, including killing cabinet ministers, and two nearly successful assassination attempts against the prime minister. Ultimately the UK conceded and the new Irish government contained ministers who had been leaders of the terrorist movement.
What I find disturbing is the disconnect between the mission statement of the NSA, i.e. counter terrorism and military threats, and what is actually done.
>The Signals Intelligence mission collects, processes, and disseminates intelligence information from foreign signals for intelligence and counterintelligence purposes and to support military operations. This Agency also enables Network Warfare operations to defeat terrorists and their organizations at home and abroad, consistent with U.S. laws and the protection of privacy and civil liberties.
I mean how spying on your ally head of state is preventing "terrorism" or supporting "military operation". Do you believe that there is a terrorist cell in l'Elysée ?
This is disingenuous at best, but looks more like dishonest.
You seem to be confusing the NSA with any agency that does any intelligence gathering or any military action of any sort. Yes, "NSA" stands for "National Security Agency," but that doesn't mean that other agencies can't perform legitimate actions for national security.
Other agencies are in charge of counter terrorism intelligence such as the FBI, DHS and NCTC.
Disclosures about their global surveillance program had much more to do with human intelligence (mass propaganda), industrial espionage, and diplomatic intelligence than terrorism.
The media seriously misinformed the American people about the duties and prerogatives on the NSA, mostly to link the NSA and its excesses to something equally controversial, however, untrue.
Anyway walking back from that line of reasoning: yes. Insurgencies around the world have had their operational security studied for decades and they are very sanitary wrt carrying around cellphones that have their batteries in, etc.
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