This all they got?

[bigtree]

Washington Post ‏@washingtonpost 44s
Is this $8,500 wire transfer really the NSA’s best case for tracking Americans’ phone records? http://wapo.st/136vYzh


The Obama administration and the U.S. intelligence community, under growing public pressure to justify the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance capabilities, have finally offered up a piece of evidence for their case that the program to track Americans’ phone call metadata is necessary to protect national security: a series of wire transfers, worth $8,500 in all, from San Diego to Somalia. In 2008.

The case is more significant than it sounds, but not by much. The money, sent by a 36-year-old cab driver named Basaaly Moalin who’d previously been injured during fighting in Somalia, allegedly went to senior members of an al-Qaeda-allied terrorist group in Somalia called al-Shabaab. That would be material support of terrorism, a serious crime. But it’s not much relative to the vast extent and scope of the NSA’s programs.

Still, amazingly, as The Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima writes in reporting on the San Diego case, “Senior intelligence officials have offered it as their primary example of the unique value of a National Security Agency program that collects tens of millions of phone records from Americans.”

That seems a little like justifying the installation of thousands of traffic cameras at every major intersection in the United States by arguing that one of them once caught someone speeding five years ago. Opponents of the program are not really convinced.

“The notion that this case could be used to justify a mass collection of data is mind-boggling, considering it’s $8,500 that went to Somalia,” Joshua Dratel, Moalin’s lawyer, told The Post. (He denies that his client sent money to al-Shabaab.)


read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/08/09/is-this-8500-wire-transfer-really-the-nsas-best-case-for-tracking-americans-phone-records/?Post+generic=%3Ftid%3Dsm_twitter_washingtonpost

[Scuba]

1. For what we spend on tracking this shit we could have bailed out Somalia - and Detroit!

And everyplace else.

[SomethingFishy]

3. Call me crazy but somehow I think that if we spent that money

feeding people instead of spying on them and sending in the drones we might have LESS terrorism.

I know it's nuts to think that if we took the money we spent on WAR and spent it helping build schools, roads, hospitals, helping farmers feed people, then maybe no one would want to attack us...

[Scuba]

4. Hippie Commie.

[SomethingFishy]

5. HEY! I said "Crazy" not "Commie"! n/t

[millennialmax]

2. LOL, one shares more information than that on their tax forms. eom

[Rex]

6. The DHS, DEA FBI and CIA have a lot of jobs

and lifelong careers riding on this country staying a perma-terror-hysteria nation and not getting back to pre-2000 days, before we all lost our minds and watched Bush Jr. try and break every law imaginable here and abroad. He did his best to insure America became the crazy Uncle Albert that always complained about the Russians under his bed, even 20 after the Cold War went cold.

This is about money and jobs. You think they really care about chatter? LOL!

[Catherina]

9. +1 n/t

[Buns_of_Fire]

7. But if they start tracking wire transfers to other countries,

how am I going to get my share of the $587 trillion I've been promised in the email from the really, no shit, third assistant vice president of Nicaragua? It's going to be transferred directly into my account, and I don't want a gaggle of politicians knocking at my door, so it has to be kept VERY VERY secret!

If the NSA wanted to do something constructive for the American people, they could track crap like this. Until then, color me singularly unimpressed.

[bigtree]

8. .

[Catherina]

10. Highway robbery. Rec'd n/t

[Fumesucker]

11. It becomes ever more obvious that there is something else behind all this

They got caught flat footed and don't have a plausible story to cover what they are actually doing, that's some pretty shoddy craftsmanship there.

You'd think professionals would have paid a little more attention to details considering the amount of money they absorb every year.

In many ways it's just like Iraq, remember how speaking the language actually became a negative in the selection process for people to oversee the Coalition Provisional Authority?

[KoKo]

12. That does seem a bit odd..if that's "all they got." Sheesh. K&R

[Logical]

13. LOL, gullible much? n-t