Oops, too heavy on the lying boys. President Obama and all the NSA honchos have bragged the bulk collection of telephone call records saved the US from terrorist attacks — bullshit. According to a member of that special White House review team, the evidence is lacking:

“It was, ‘Huh, hello? What are we doing here?’” said Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor, in an interview with NBC News.
“The results were very thin.”

(Illustration found here).

Supposedly, the entire aim of this massive swelling of the US intelligence apparatus the past decade — and way before, too — was to thwart those nefarious terrorist plots made against the homeland. Or words to that effect.
However, apparently the game is pretty-much a failure.
Obama claimed last June, while trying to calm, cool-and-collect German Chancellor Angela Merkel (shit had just hit the fan about the NSA listening to Merkel’s cellphone), Americans were kept safe: “And as a consequence, we’ve saved lives. We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information not just in the United States, but, in some cases, threats here in Germany. So lives have been saved. And the encroachment on privacy has been strictly limited by a court-approved process to relate to these particular categories.”
And, of course, seemingly nearly-100-percent bullshit.
The complete encapsulation of this NSA saga came last June via James Clapper, head of national intelligence:

In an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, he (Clapper) said that “I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner, by saying no,” though he also called his answer “too cute by half.”
He indicated that his response to Wyden turned on a definition of “collect:”
“There are honest differences on the semantics of what — when someone says ‘collection’ to me, that has a specific meaning, which may have a different meaning to him.”

Walking the dog with bullshit.
In October, ProPublica posted an excellent analysis on all those NSA claims, and like that review-team guy above, found the results ‘very thin.’
Further from that NBC News story this morning:

While Stone said the mass collection of telephone call records was a “logical program” from the NSA’s perspective, one question the White House panel was seeking to answer was whether it had actually stopped “any [terror attacks] that might have been really big.”
“We found none,” said Stone.
…
Stone was one of five members of the White House review panel — and the only one without any intelligence community experience — that this week produced a sweeping report recommending that the NSA’s collection of phone call records be terminated to protect Americans’ privacy rights.
The panel made that recommendation after concluding that the program was “not essential in preventing attacks.”
“That was stunning. That was the ballgame,” said one congressional intelligence official, who asked not to be publicly identified.
“It flies in the face of everything that they have tossed at us.”

Interesting tale unfolded by Eddie Snowden — a lie, then after a document dump, a walk back. Obama danced a bit of walk-back today during a presser, and also tried a ‘too cute by half‘ spin (from the Guardian):

“In light of the disclosures, it is clear that whatever benefits the configuration of this particular programme may have, may be outweighed by the concerns that people have on its potential abuse,” Obama told an end-of-year White House press conference.
“If it that’s the case, there may be a better way of skinning the cat.”

Who’s the cat? The American people? The NSA? Snowden?

(ht/ Firedoglake)