Edward Snowden criticized the U.S. government for failing to anticipate the Boston Marathon bombings, blaming their focus on mass surveillance for allowing them to miss actual credible threats.
Snowden was speaking remotely to a class of Harvard students.
“We miss attacks, we miss leads, and investigations fail because when the government is doing its ‘collect it all’ investigation, where we’re watching everybody, we’re not seeing anything with specificity because it is impossible to keep an eye on all of your targets when you’re constantly dumping more hay on top of them,” Snowden told them.
Although the U.S. government had been warned by Russia that the two future accomplices in the bombings were extremists, “We didn’t really watch these guys,” Snowden said. “And the question is, why?”
Snowden argued that, with limited resources, it is wrong to waste efforts on mass surveillance that may or may not turn up anything of value.
“The reality of that is because we do have finite resources and the question is, should we be spending 10 billion dollars a year on mass-surveillance programs of the NSA to the extent that we no longer have effective means of traditional [targeting]?”
“We’re watching everybody that we have no reason to be watching,” Snowden alleged, “simply because it may have value, at the expense of being able to watch specific people for which we have a specific cause for investigating, and that’s something that we need to look carefully at how to balance.”
Watch the video clip at the National Journal.
