Background on NSA with perhaps a different perspective

[Yo_Mama]

There's a Gizmodo article on the head of NSA's peculiarities.
http://gizmodo.com/nsa-chiefs-former-war-room-was-modeled-after-the-stars-1277508181

Here is the source article, for which you will have to sign up to read:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/09/08/the_cowboy_of_the_nsa_keith_alexander?page=full&wp_login_redirect=0

There's some funny and frankly weird stuff, like the info that this guy had a situation room specially designed to look the bridge of the Enterprise, and then gave hoo-haw tours so everyone could sit in the Picard chair. But the part that I think is important (you may disagree) is about the approach they are taking and its practical effects. The Foreign Policy article also discusses Heath's interaction with Alexander:

"He had all these diagrams showing how this guy was connected to that guy and to that guy," says a former NSA official who heard Alexander give briefings on the floor of the Information Dominance Center. "Some of my colleagues and I were skeptical. Later, we had a chance to review the information. It turns out that all [that] those guys were connected to were pizza shops."

A retired military officer who worked with Alexander also describes a "massive network chart" that was purportedly about al Qaeda and its connections in Afghanistan. Upon closer examination, the retired officer says, "We found there was no data behind the links. No verifiable sources. We later found out that a quarter of the guys named on the chart had already been killed in Afghanistan."

and

"There's two ways of looking at these guys," the retired military officer says. "Two visionaries who took risks and pushed the intelligence community forward. Or as two guys who blew a monumental amount of money."

I'm sure both are true, but at the end of the day what do we have to show for it? The details of what slowly has emerged seem to imply that the agency is casting so wide a net that they are generating a huge mass of amorphous suspicion about which there is no manpower available to delve. I am sure that justifies more automated monitoring, but does it work? And do we really need NSA directors building Hollywood sets to wow their Congressional lobbyists?

I am concerned about the civil liberties issues, but I am also concerned about national security. When I back off and look at this dispassionately, it appears to me that we have made no gains since 9/11 and perhaps have lost net function.

Both the Boston bombers and the Fort Hood psycho psychiatrist achieved their aims not due to the fact that they were superhumanly clever and ran below the intelligence/surveillance radar, but due to the fact that the obvious clues (including those raising concerns) were utterly ignored, probably because the actual investigating authorities had too much on their plates.

It is dispiriting and should raise concerns that the intelligence community which failed to properly properly investigate reports of student pilots who didn't think they needed to learn to land plans also didn't or couldn't act on multiple warnings over the activities of the nutcases who bombed an effing footrace more than a decade later.

We've probably spent more than a trillion dollars on this, and have we really gotten ANYTHING from it? Okay, okay, members of Congressional staffs got to sit in the Jean Luc Picard chair, but wouldn't it have been cheaper just to sponsor paid tours to Hollywood? And then perhaps we could have used the money to hire a few more investigators who could check out individuals about whom we have received explicit warnings?