The Danish Newspaper

The plot to attack the Danish newspaper is a particularly absurd case to cite as justification for keeping the phone dragnet. The terrorist in this case is David Coleman Headley. Even a cursory look at his story suggests numerous ways that the U.S. government could’ve stopped him years before they did, and renders absurd the suggestion that he could only be identified through bulk collection of metadata.

As Pro Publica reports

The convicted drug smuggler radicalized and joined Lashkar in Pakistan in the late 1990s while spying on Pakistani heroin traffickers as a paid informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration. His associates first warned federal agencies about his Islamic extremism days after the Sept. 11 attacks. Investigators questioned him in front of his DEA handlers in New York, and he was cleared. U.S. prosecutors then made the unusual decision to end Headley's probation for a drug conviction three years early. He then hurried to Pakistan and began training in Lashkar terror camps. Although the DEA insists he was deactivated in early 2002, some U.S., European and Indian officials suspect that he remained an informant in some capacity and that the DEA ... sent him to Pakistan to spy ... Those officials believe his status as an operative or former informant may have deflected subsequent FBI inquiries. The FBI received new tips in 2002 and in 2005 when Headley's wife in New York had him arrested for domestic violence and told counterterror investigators about his radicalism and training in Pakistan. Inquiries were conducted, but he was not interviewed or placed on a watch list, officials have said ... In late 2007... another wife told U.S. embassy officials in Islamabad that Headley was a terrorist and a spy, describing his frequent trips to Mumbai and his stay at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. In fact, Headley was conducting meticulous surveillance on the Taj and other targets for an impending attack by a seaborne squad of gunmen. Once again, U.S. agencies say they did not question or monitor him because the information from the wife was not specific enough … The final tip to authorities about Headley came from a family friend days after the Mumbai attacks … FBI agents in Philadelphia questioned a cousin of Headley’s. The cousin lied, saying Headley was in Pakistan when he was actually at home in Chicago … The cousin alerted Headley about the FBI inquiry, but Headley went to Denmark as planned. U.S. agencies did not find Headley or warn foreign counterparts about him in the first half of 2009 while he conducted surveillance in Denmark and India and met … al-Qaida leaders.

After all that, the U.S. only caught up with Headley after a tip from British intelligence! “Supporters of sweeping U.S. surveillance say it's needed to build a haystack of information in which to find a needle,” Pro Publica would conclude. “In Headley's case, it appears the U.S. was handed the needle—and then deployed surveillance that led to the arrest and prosecution of Headley and other plotters.”

To sum up, Fleitz’s national-security claim is unsubstantiated while skeptics of Section 215 are on solid ground. As Peter Bergen put it in his report for the New America Foundation, “Surveillance of American phone metadata has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism and only the most marginal of impacts on preventing terrorist-related activity, such as fundraising for a terrorist group.”

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ormer deputy CIA director Michael Morell that “Had the [metadata] program been in place more than a decade ago, it would likely have prevented 9/11. And it has the potential to prevent the next 9/11.”

A compelling reason to discount that claim was recently A compelling reason to discount that claim was recently offered by Julian Sanchez, writing in the aftermath of the revelation that the Drug Enforcement Administration was running another international phone-metadata program as early as the 1990s. He writes The National Review article next turns to a terrorist attack that preceded the phone dragnet, quoting a speculative claim by f

… the [NSA] program’s defenders often suggest that had we only had some kind of bulk telephone database, the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks could have been identified via their calls to a known safehouse in Yemen. Now, of course, we know that there was such a database—and indeed, a database that had already been employed in other counterterror investigations, including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. It does not appear to have helped. Second, we now know that DEA was able to “find another solution” to monitor calls related to suspected narcotics traffickers when the program was ended in 2013, using targeted orders. It is, according to reports, somewhat more costly and time consuming—but it ultimately achieves the same ends without requiring the government to vacuum up millions of innocent people’s international call records.

Turning to the legality of the metadata program, Fleitz correctly observes that federal judges and others are divided on whether the program violates the Bill of Rights. He goes on to note, “Opponents of the 215 program are now praising a decision on May 7 by a New York Court of Appeals panel that found that the program was not authorized by the Patriot Act. However, this decision fell far short of what the ACLU was seeking in the case, since the court did not order the 215 program halted, noting that the debate in Congress could render the issue moot.”