Glenn Greenwald examines how our modern surveillance state has too much to process, therefore leading to the intel failures exemplified by the Abdulmutallab attempt on Christmas Day:
The problem is never that the U.S. Government lacks sufficient power to engage in surveillance, interceptions, intelligence-gathering and the like. Long before 9/11 -- from the Cold War -- we have vested extraordinarily broad surveillance powers in the U.S. Government to the point that we have turned ourselves into a National Security and Surveillance State. Terrorist attacks do not happen because there are too many restrictions on the government's ability to eavesdrop and intercept communications, or because there are too many safeguards and checks. If anything, the opposite is true: the excesses of the Surveillance State -- and the steady abolition of oversights and limits -- have made detection of plots far less likely. Despite that, we have an insatiable appetite -- especially when we're frightened anew -- to vest more and more unrestricted spying and other powers in our Government, which -- like all governments -- is more than happy to accept them.
More collected information doesn't mean more safety. It just means more convolution for our intelligence gathering officials to sort through. The Patriot Act again and again proves to be the poster child for egregious U.S. government policy on a variety of fronts.
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