Snowden
suggested that United States had the proper intelligence ahead of
9/11 but failed to act.
“You know, and this is a key question that the 9/11
Commission considered. And what they found, in the post-mortem,
when they looked at all of the classified intelligence from all
of the different intelligence agencies, they found that we had
all of the information we needed as an intelligence community, as
a classified sector, as the national defense of the United States
to detect this plot,” Snowden said. “We actually had
records of the phone calls from the United States and out. The
CIA knew who these guys were. The problem was not that we weren’t
collecting information, it wasn’t that we didn’t have enough
dots, it wasn’t that we didn’t have a haystack, it was that we
did not understand the haystack that we have.”
“The problem with mass surveillance is that we’re piling more
hay on a haystack we already don’t understand, and this is the
haystack of the human lives of every American citizen in our
country,” Snowden continued. “If these programs aren’t
keeping us safe, and they’re making us miss connections — vital
connections — on information we already have, if we’re taking
resources away from traditional methods of investigation, from
law enforcement operations that we know work, if we’re missing
things like the Boston Marathon bombings where all of these mass
surveillance systems, every domestic dragnet in the world didn’t
reveal guys that the Russian intelligence service told us about
by name, is that really the best way to protect our country? Or
are we — are we trying to throw money at a magic solution that’s
actually not just costing us our safety, but our rights and our
way of life?http://rt.com/usa/162576-nbc-snowden-september-attack/