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.
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.