Judge Falls for The Big Lie About NSA Spying
Even Before 9/11, NSA Knew In Real-Time Which Countries Both Parties to Phone Calls Were In. In finding the NSA’s metadata collection program legal today, Judge William Pauley III ruled: The September 11th terrorist attacks revealed, in the starkest terms, just how dangerous and interconnected the world is. While Americans depended on technology for the conveniences of modernity, al-Qaeda plotted in a seventh-century milieu to use that technology against us. It was a bold jujitsu. And it succeeded because conventional intelligence gathering could not detect diffuse filaments connecting al-Qaeda. [...] The Government learned from its mistake and adapted to confront a new enemy: a terror network capable of orchestrating attacks across the world. It launched a number of counter-measures, including a bulk telephony metadata collection program—a wide net that could find and isolate gossamer contacts among suspected terrorists in an ocean of seemingly disconnected data. [...] Judge Pauley is uninformed … and he fell for the “big lie” behind NSA spying. [W]hile Binney headed NSA’s global digital communications gathering efforts prior to 9/11, his team knew in real-time which countries calls were made from and received in. The NSA is lying if it claims otherwise.
Reason.com: Judge Says the NSA Can Look at Your Phone Records Because They're Not Yours