Rena Schild/Shutterstock.com

The New America Foundation (NAF) has released a damning report claiming the NSA's mass surveillance programme has "no discernible impact" on the prevention of terrorism.

The report, "Do NSA's Bulk Surveillance Programs Stop Terrorists?", also claims that the NSA is guilty of repeatedly exaggerating the efficacy of its bulk surveillance techniques in addition to misleading the public over aspects of 9/11, and of failing to prevent crime efficiently due to an insufficient understanding of its own intelligence already sourced by traditional means.


The NAF describes itself as a non-profit, nonpartisan public policy institute and think tank focussing on a wide range of issues, including national security studies. Investigating claims made by the US government concerning the competence and effectiveness of the NSA's bulk surveillance since 9/11, the NAF report compiled a database of 225 people from the US, including US nationals abroad, who have been indicted, convicted, or killed since the 9/11 terror attacks.

Key methods used to initiate investigations on these individuals were identified by the report and divided into eight separate categories: "Those cases in which the initiating or key role was played by the bulk collection of American telephone metadata under Section 215; NSA surveillance of non-US persons overseas under Section 702;

NSA surveillance under an unknown authority; tips from the extremist's family or local community members; tips regarding suspicious activity from individuals who were not part of an extremist's family or local community; the use of an undercover informant; the routine conduct of law enforcement or intelligence operations in which the NSA did not play a key role; and self-disclosure of extremist activity on the part of the extremist in question."

The bulk collection of US citizen's telephone metadata...accounts for having aided only 1.8 percent of the NSA's terrorist cases. Do NSA's Bulk Surveillance Programs Stop Terrorism?


The report also acknowledges that the public records from which it drew the information may be incomplete and that there is reason to believe the government has actively concealed the role of NSA programmes in some investigations: "Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents have been trained in some instances, for example, to conceal the role of a DEA unit that analysed metadata to initiate cases."

The bulk collection of US citizens' telephone metadata -- which includes phone numbers, both incoming and outgoing, as well as the exact time, date and duration of the calls (but not the content) under Section 215 of the US Patriot Act -- accounts for having aided only 1.8 percent of the NSA's terrorist cases.

The bulk surveillance programme did not expedite the investigative process, despite the US government's claims to the contrary KeepInline

An equally unimpressive 4.4 percent of terrorism cases were aided by the NSA's surveillance of non-US persons outside of the United States under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act.


Commenting on these figures the report states, "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."

Of the terrorist plot regularly cited by the US government as evidence of the necessity and success of its surveillance techniques -- namely, Basaaly Moalin, a San Diego taxi driver who provided $8,500 (£5,171) to an al-Qaeda affiliate in Somalia -- the NAF report states that the NSA's actions contradict its claims that the expediency afforded by Section 215 was largely responsible for the success of Moalin's capture. "According to the government, the database of American phone metadata allows intelligence authorities to quickly circumvent the traditional burden of proof associated with criminal warrants, thus allowing them to 'connect the dots' faster and prevent future 9/11-scale attacks. Yet in the Moalin case, after using the NSA's phone database to link a number in Somalia to Moalin, the FBI waited two months to begin an investigation and wiretap his phone."

New America Foundation

The reasons behind the two-month delay -- during which time the FBI was not monitoring Moalin's calls, despite being aware of his number and identity -- are still unclear. What is clear, however, is that the bulk surveillance programme did not expedite the investigative process, despite the US government's claims to the contrary.


The report also reviewed three key terrorism cases frequently cited by the US government in defence of the NSA's bulk surveillance. It concluded that government officials exaggerated the role of the NSA in the cases against David Coleman Headley and Najibullah Zazi. The significance of the threat of Zazi, who planned to bomb the New York Stock Exchange, was also exaggerated, claims the report.

More emphasis, the report suggests, should be placed on conventional forms of law enforcement, which are demonstrably more efficient. "The overall problem for US counterterrorism officials is not that they need vaster amounts of information from the bulk surveillance programs, but that they don't sufficiently understand or widely share the information they already possess that was derived from conventional law enforcement and intelligence techniques."

Read the full report (PDF) and an additional break down of the details.