Declassified Report Shows Doubts About Value of N.S.A.’s Warrantless Spying

GOV'T REPORT SHOWS QUESTIONABLE VALUE OF NSA WARRANTLESS SPYING: "The secrecy surrounding the National Security Agency’s post-9/11 warrantless surveillance and bulk data collection program hampered its effectiveness, and many members of the intelligence community later struggled to identify any specific terrorist attacks it thwarted, a newly declassified document shows. The document is a lengthy report on a once secret N.S.A. program code-named Stellarwind. … But little came of the Stellarwind tips. In 2004, the F.B.I. looked at a sampling of all the tips to see how many had made a “significant contribution” to identifying a terrorist, deporting a terrorism suspect, or developing a confidential informant about terrorists. Just 1.2 percent of the tips from 2001 to 2004 had made such a contribution. Two years later, the F.B.I. reviewed all the leads from the warrantless wiretapping part of Stellarwind between August 2004 and January 2006. None had proved useful. Still, the report includes several redacted paragraphs describing “success” cases." (New York Times)http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/25/us/politics/value-of-nsa-warrantless-spying-is-doubted-in-declassified-reports.html