Reminds me of the TSA not revealing how many terrorists it has ever caught due to "national security concerns" [1].<p>Yet they proudly blog about how many guns, knives and other prohibited items they screen out--but this is not statistically different than the private contractors pre-TSA.<p>What we do know is that when tested by Homeland Security, they failed miserably [2]. I wonder if we have data from pre-TSA to compare it with?<p>[1] - <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2010/11/does_the_tsa_ever_catch_terrorists.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...</a><p>[2] - <a href="https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/06/tsa_not_detecti.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/06/tsa_not_detec...</a>
Seriously diminishing returns may be emerging in bulk collection. The disgruntlement this is creating in the intelligence community work force and the recruiting pool may not be worth the gains. Hard targets must be taking counter-measures as awareness grows. But, in fairness to the IC, its really a political problem. If zero tolerance is the goal for attacks against the US then zero privacy is going to be the result.
They don't know because they aren't trying but i'm guessing its basically nearly 100% of the population. Its sort of a mathematical x degree's of separation problem. They monitor a few tens (hundreds?) thousand suspects, the direct contacts of said suspects and maybe or to two levels more. So its what 3-4 degrees of separation? Given that "direct contact" likely also means that anyone found in proximity of the suspects for any length of time and its basically everyone, after all you want to tract the contacts the suspects have with people on the park bench. People forget that "metadata" isn't just phone calls these days, its your cellphone pinging the tower with "I'm at location x" messages every few seconds.
The authority of spy agencies to do what they do derives from the people through their congressional representatives. Congress should zero out their funding. We can always start over without the bad apples.
It's either a ton of people and they don't want to admit it OR it's very, very few people and they don't want to be asked the obvious follow up question of "who are they?"
That's easy: everyone.<p>The only distinction is who's explicitly targeted and who isn't. In other words, who analysts have actually examined or otherwise examine on an ongoing basis.
Why did the USA fight for freedom against the British, Hitler, and Saddam if America just ended up as a police state? All those American soldiers died in vain.