Electronic Surveillance Failures Leading up to the 2008 Mumbai Terrorist Attacks
Long New York Times article based on “former American and Indian officials and classified documents disclosed by Edward J. Snowden” outlining the intelligence failures leading up to the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks:
Although electronic eavesdropping often yields valuable data, even tantalizing clues can be missed if the technology is not closely monitored, the intelligence gleaned from it is not linked with other information, or analysis does not sift incriminating activity from the ocean of digital data.
This seems to be the moral:
Although the United States computer arsenal plays a vital role against targets ranging from North Korea’s suspected assault on Sony to Russian cyberthieves and Chinese military hacking units, counterterrorism requires a complex mix of human and technical resources. Some former counterterrorism officials warn against promoting billion-dollar surveillance programs with the narrow argument that they stop attacks.
That monitoring collects valuable information, but large amounts of it are “never meaningfully reviewed or analyzed,” said Charles (Sam) Faddis, a retired C.I.A. counterterrorism chief. “I cannot remember a single instance in my career when we ever stopped a plot based purely on signals intelligence.”
[…]
Intelligence officials say that terror plots are often discernible only in hindsight, when a pattern suddenly emerges from what had been just bits of information. Whatever the reason, no one fully grasped the developing Mumbai conspiracy.
“They either weren’t looking or didn’t understand what it all meant,” said one former American official who had access to the intelligence and would speak only on the condition of anonymity. “There was a lot more noise than signal. There usually is.”
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z • February 12, 2015 7:32 AM
I think the real purpose of broad electronic surveillance is to go back in time, not to look ahead. As good as the sorting and analyzing algorithms might be, the evidence suggests that there is just too much data to be analyzed properly to stop a future attack.
However, if you caught a terrorist in the act or after it, you can then go back and find out with whom he communicated and when. That would be immensely easier than finding the terrorist in the haystack before he strikes.
Obviously, the most perilous attribute is that this same technique can be used to find dirt on anyone, for any reason. Want the Supreme Court to rule a certain way? Go through the browsing history of each Justice and threaten to leak their porn habits. Want a company to install a backdoor? Sift through the CEO’s past emails and see if there’s a crime in there, or something embarrassing and potentially ruinous to the company.
But the “We do this to prevent terrorism” nonsense is ridiculous. That’s the one thing it has shown to be very poor at doing.