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It makes good intuitive sense. It just doesn’t happen to be true.

The first clue that it’s a lie is that many of security experts have said so. That includes NSA veteran, William Binney.

“It doesn’t help to make the haystack orders of magnitude larger, because it makes it orders of magnitude more difficult to find that needle in that haystack,” Blaney said to PBS.

The more data a security agency collects, the more it must sift through. It can’t possibly sift through all the spam from your long-lost Ugandan uncle efficiently enough to find those who plan to set off bombs during a marathon in Boston.

So if a mass surveillance apparatus had only one job — preventing terror attacks — it might have fallen under the proud ownership of a trash collector by now. But cyber spies have other uses. It’s bleakly effortless to imagine a government getting creative with a system ostensibly designed to track security threats but — oh, what’s this? — also tracks every digital movement of political opponents, economic competitors, media critics and internal whistleblowers.

We needn’t imagine much. We already know: that Britain’s spy agency has listed investigative journalists as security threats and that its sticky tentacles have pocketed emails from the world’s top news organizations; that the NSA has mused that within the next 10-20 years it might conduct surveillance in a such a way that its “findings would be useful to U.S. industry”; that it has spied on Brazilian oil company Petrobras; and that its Five Eyes counterpart, the Australian Signals Directorate, has spied on an American law firm representing Indonesia when Indonesia was in a trade dispute with the U.S and — another exemplar of generosity of spirit — offered to share its findings with the U.S.