Friday, February 28, 2020

FEEB Spy Program Was Worthless

The guy who ran the program has some remarks.

Retired Special Agent Bassem Youssef ran the FBI’s Communications Analysis Unit from late 2004 until his retirement in late 2014. He told Just the News he fears the deeply flawed program, which was started in response to the Sept. 11 attacks, was allowed to keep going to give Americans a false sense of security in the war on terror and possibly to enable inappropriate spying, such as that which targeted President Trump’s 2016 campaign....

...the FBI performed an audit of the highly classified program (also known as the NSA program because it searched call records captured by the National Security Agency) after Edward Snowden leaked its existence.

The audit showed that while the program had generated two moderate leads for counterterrorism cases, it had not helped thwart dozens of terrorism attacks as officials had claimed, despite costing tens of millions of dollars per year.

In fact, the program was generating large numbers of “false negatives and positives,” Youssef said....
So. It was a typical bureaucracy. Employed lotsa people, cost a lot of money, did nothing at all.

Nice.

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