It's not that the NSA's entire mission has boiled down to monitoring 300 phone numbers worldwide.
What is being stated is that "[l]ast year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records gathered daily by the NSA". (http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2021199412_nsatechd...)
Of course there is more at play here, but they should be selling how many terrorist attacks they avoided, now how many people they snooped.
You can't represent cost:threat ratio as dollars per person tracked. The major reason for why the program exists is to detect and break-up one-off major terrorist plots so even if the NSA was detecting all worldwide terror plans against the U.S. the number of people they were tracking would never be very high.
This is what all the people saying that the risk of dying from terrorism is so completely low have been reminding us, remember?
Sure you can. If you're only using the program to track 300 people, the average cost is the total cost divided by 300.
As you point out, there is a very small risk of dying from a terrorist plot is low. So if we're spending so much money and only tracking 300 people, there is clearly a problem.
But let me guess, victim blaming is OK, as long as the victims are Americans?
But that argument then puts the whole program at a ridiculous cost to threat ratio.
Major terrorist acts e.g. 9/11 have a devastating impact on the economy. It results in a country-wide drop in consumer spending, consumer confidence, business spending, business confidence, hiring etc. As well as locally in areas like tourism. It alone accounted for a 1.1% drop in the third quarter GDP in 2011.
As an example in NYC alone 430,000 jobs and 2.8 billion in wages were lost in the 3 months after 9/11. Which in turn results in a big drop in the tax collected.
Then finally there is the after effects. No 9/11 and there would have been no costly invasion into Iraq/Afghanistan which has cost trillions of dollars and an obscene number of lives. Major terrorist acts always demand a response by the public.
So out of all the things the government does protecting its citizens seems like something that will always be "worth the money".
I have some doubts about us not going to war had there been no terrorist attack. Perhaps it would have been in a different country or continent, but there has been military action under every administration since Eisenhower. I have this sneaky suspicion that the war in Iraq would have happened regardless of any terrorist attack. I would even go as far as to say that the war in Iraq would have happened under a hypothetical Gore administration.
"So out of all the things the government does protecting its citizens seems like something that will always be "worth the money"."
Assuming, of course, that this program has accomplished anything. We are still waiting to see what details will be declassified. It is not enough that supporters of the program claim terrorist plots were stopped; we need to know (a) if the program was actually important to stopping those plots and (b) if those plots were realistic to begin with.
Citation needed!
9/11 did indeed have a devastating impact on the economy - because of the very poorly thought out response of the Bush administration.
On the other hand, Norway's response to their worst ever act of terrorism was as follows:
Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg pledged to do everything to ensure the country's core values were not undermined. "The Norwegian response to violence is more democracy, more openness and greater political participation," he said. (from: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120724/20363519819/one-ye... )
Do you think the US would be better off today if they adopted such a policy - instead of the Patriot Act?
I was at Sabre (spin-off of American Airlines, owner of Travelocity, creator of travel agency software) at the time, in HR's development group. (Actually that group had been acquired by EDS, but same group, same role, different name on the paycheck) Within a trading day of the attack, they lost 50% in market cap. We went from massive projects to calculate performance based compensation to doing it on a simple spreadsheet. Many lost their jobs, including me.
We could have never allowed foreign tourists into the country. That has a cost associated with it, right? That would prevented Saudis from going to flight school and booking those flights, right? Shouldn't protecting lives be before every other consideration?
No, we have to balance things. Protecting life can not prevent us from living our lives. Not everything the government chooses to do is worth the price.
Because I was specifically talking about the costs associated with terrorist acts. And that preventing them has significant and widespread benefits to the economy. It's pretty clear that focusing just on ROI alone this program is easily worth the price.
And nobody can take you seriously trying to shovel the excessive amount of money spent on anti-terrorism (or, as for Iraq, not on anti-terrorism) into the cost of a terrorist act and then trying to use that as justification for spending money on anti-terrorism. If we spent half the GDP on anti-terrorism after 9/11 you would be claiming 9/11 cost us half the GDP and that therefore justifies spending half the GDP on it. It's circular logic.
Intercepting messages with either "reasonable" means or "unreasonable means + probable cause warrant" also doesn't violate the Fourth Amendment.
So I wouldn't necessarily make your sole complaint about the legality of the program, as it may very well soon be both legal and Constitutional.
What about all that stuff about chilling effects and anonymous speech?
We let idiots have their stupid rallies because it's not the government's job to decide who gets to speak, and because the laws you would like to use against the KKK or WBC end up getting used against Malcolm X or Occupy protestors at a different time or in a different part of the country.
And just to remind everyone, the reason we're worried about chilling effects and anonymous speech is that you don't want the first person to write anything challenging corrupt power structures to get indicted with "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" charges backstopped by prolific surveillance, or have their house burned down by ideological opponents who use government powers to discover dissidents and are subsequently never prosecuted. Not only does that allow the injustice of corrupt power retaliating against activists for good, there is a real risk that the retaliation will be an effective deterrent to future activists.
Which is more risky for police state purposes, a PRISM system that requires at least corporate legal review for specific individuals, or a system that would tap into all Internet traffic?
Now, which of those have we known about for a longer time?
Either they need all this access and funding to surveil a large number of dangerous people, or they dont need either to surveil such a small number of people. If it only resulted in 300 phone numbers to track, then sure, maybe the privacy violations weren't as bad (hypothetically). But that argument then puts the whole program at a ridiculous cost to threat ratio, and should be shutdown because it isn't effective at all and is a waste of taxpayer money.
Lose, Lose NSA - You're either violating our liberties or wasting our money.