Cross-Posted from Washington’s Blog.

We’ve extensively documented that mass surveillance does NOT help prevent terror attacks.

Top experts have said that treating everyone like a potential terrorist WEAKENS our ability to protect America.

The former head of the NSA’s global intelligence gathering operations – William Binney – says that the current spying program not only violates Americans’ privacy, but sucks up so much data that it INTERFERES with the government’s ability to catch bad guys.

Binney told Washington’s Blog:

The zone of suspects was for us limited to two degrees (hops). Beyond that increases the problem exponentially. So, three hops is going much too far.

(Explanation of degrees and hops).

In the following brief excerpt from an interview by PBS NewsHour, Binney explains that over-the-top spying actually interfered with the government’s ability to stop the Boston bombing:

Judy Woodruff: You know the government says that it is only doing this to keep us safe. This is the only way we can have that information at our fingertips when we then have a reason to believe that someone would do this country or its people harm.

Binney: That in my mind has been nonsense from the beginning. Because we had zero problem tracking all of these terrorists all along. We had no difficulty doing that.

And I left those principles in place at the NSA when I retired there. One was to use the 2 degree principle for zones of suspicion. That is, if a terrorist called someone in the U.S., that was the first degree from the terrorist. And the second degree was who that terrorist called inside the United States.

So far, all of the testimony I’ve been listening to by people down in D.C. about this program – and they refer to different cases they’ve been talking about, in terms of terrorists – everyone one fit into that zone of suspicion. None of them were outside it.

The rest of it means they’re collecting more data, making the haystack so much bigger so that’s making it more difficult to find the needles. That’s why they’re missing people, like the bombers in Boston.

Similarly, Israeli-American terrorism expert Barry Rubins points out: