Both 9/11 and covid are a case of human error (the latter more incompetence and inaction though); at 9/11 they HAD all the information they needed, where the terrorists had been, their communications, etc (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks#FBI), but they apparently didn't connect the dots, failed to act, failed to not grant them entry into the country, etc.

Mind you, a lot of these projects are post-9/11 so I'm confident a lot of it has been a result of it and the massive financial injections that the US government put into counter-terrorism since then.

Finally, I like to think that the NSA and co don't want to advertise how much attempts they thwart; if they, for example, stop an attack every day, the people will become afraid of terrorists because incidents happen so often. But I'm not sure if they are being kept silent.

Also in the 9/11 commission report the one hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui was under investigation by the FBI in Minnesota and their FISA warrant was denied. The dispute was supposedly also over a "lack of communication/cooperation" between the FBI and CIA in active investigations.

Coleen Rowley was the whistle-blower on this event, and testified to congress. Everything on the laptop had the evidence of the 9/11 attacks, but was blocked by the FISA court.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleen_Rowley

Ironically great investigators with 2001 tech could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Appallingly then the FISA court approved the whole sale surveillance of any Verizon customer. The wholesale Verizon order was the 1st and one of the biggest important information leaks from the Snowden documents.

A court that was set up to protect the civil liberties of Americans during the abuses of the 1960's-1970's failed in the protection of the largest terrorist attack in US history, but was then used to circumvent the civil liberties and privacy rights of a massive numbers of American citizens.

Then the government used the pretext of 9/11 to create these technologies by for the NSA to surveil the large majority of its own citizens, when all that was needed was 1 FISA warrant approval.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_A._Drake

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_o...

It's appalling, with the loss of our rights and the digital world now being used to further deteriorate these rights when it can be used in such better and positive ways.

Also a 20+ year war, Trillions of dollars, and millions of deaths could have prevented from not blocking this warrant. While right now, with COVID, we could use Trillions of dollars to help keep US citizens safe and use it for small business support during these tough times.

yes indeed it's a touchy system that can't be disclosed..

In a society governed through secrets, we can never know what the sovereign is really doing in our name. This is the case with the USA today - it is not truly an open society, but one of layers .. and those with the 'special privilege' of having security clearances are desperate to maintain that socially high-class standing among themselves, so they wrap more and more secret agency around the issue so that the general public can never know, truly, what their sovereign is doing.

This allows immense corruption and profiteering. However, its not all just "ma' capitalism" - there are very strong indicators that a socialist superstate is being constructed within this society, which is parasitically feeding on the corpse of America today. Many consider the US military industrial complex the largest socialist organization that ever existed - it certainly crosses a lot of the boxes.

Socialism is when the Government does stuff. Rich capitalists lobbying and corrupting the Government to give their private organizations more money is Socialism.

Socialism is destroying America!! Can't you see??!

Specifically, the American Military-Industrial complex is a socialist welfare state hell-bent on owning all means of production in America, yes. It produces nothing of any value to society, and demands that it be fed from the coffers before anything else.

And yes, it is the American government doing this.

From my reading of the history of these kind of organisations, I think what’s happening is twofold - firstly, that they’re often looking at the wrong people/groups, and secondly, just so much intelligence they have just ends up being wrong or misleading.

Their mission has become “collect it all”, but I think they (and a lot of commentators and even everyday people) can’t really imagine what a large percentage of intelligence is useless noise, deliberately wrong (such as counterintelligence but they don’t realise), just plain wrong (like most intel gathered from torture - people will say literally anything they think you want to hear), correct but misinterpreted, etc.. And it’s extremely hard to meaningfully sort through that much information. I expect they do expend a lot of effort trying to combat this, but historically I don’t believe they’re very good at it, and I’m sceptical machine learning and things like that is really going to help that much.

And then just watching the wrong people. Take the Boston bombing, for instance. There are reports that the key focus of groups like the DHS at the time in that area were the Occupy Boston protests, so the bombing happened even though the FBI had been tipped off about one of the bombers from Russian intelligence services. Then things like the NZ mosque attack, where this far-right wing white supremacist came from Australia and murdered a bunch of people. At the time, the media where I am in Australia was reporting FUD campaigns from Australian security agencies about ISIS and Islamic terrorism, radicalisation etc., so I imagine that’s where the focus was and he slipped through.

This goes way back throughout history. Just think of the massive amount of wasted resources surveilling suspected “communists and homosexuals” back in the day. Here they had agents actually infiltrating university communist groups. The groups got up to extremely dangerous things like going to protests - great use of millions of dollars of surveillance...

> watching the wrong people

I wonder ... it seems like there might be a certain personality profile that is inclined to a security career -- might be correlated.

How would the NSA do anything about COVID or any illness for that matter?

Well... if you can hear every convo on the planet (allegedly) you surely can detect an increase cough / sick / emergency related calls in the same area.

But then your chosen government would still have to act on that information.

True, my question is quite vain since we'll never know at what level the information got stuck. monitoring, intelligence, political .. pick any

The successful early attempts to shut down covid relied on contact tracing of international travelers. Very much in the purview of the NSA.

They even failed to keep it from literally putting a carrier out of commission.