Security Expert Lt. Colonel Tony Shaffer NSA Program PRISM Did Not Foil 2009 NY City Subway Plot, We Were Aided by the British

As Jack Webb, Sgt. Joe Friday of Dragnet fame would say, “Just the facts ma’am” …

Before anyone decides that giving away their freedoms and liberties and shredding the U.S. Constitution is ok and having the NSA surveillance record all of our telephone conversations, emails, etc. forever is necessary to protect them against terrorism, think again. This morning on FOX News, Security Expert Lt. Colonel Tony Shaffer, from the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, stated that PRISM did not catch the 2009 New York Subway bombers, the British did. Defenders of the government’s online spying program, “PRISM” claimed on Friday that it was responsible for preventing the NY City subway bombing. Correction, it did not.

“Let me say very clearly. The 2009 thing is a MacGuffin. They did not use this program to get the 2009 bombing stopped. It was actually the British who helped us do that.
And, more importantly they missed the Major Hassan Nidal attack. He was in touch with Anwar al-Awlaki. And, we missed the Boston bombing, too. The credibility of the program is not there.” [...]
Because there s so much documentation being obtained, we can’t actually focus on what is necessary to get to the real terrorists.”

From Buzz Feed comes the following … Public Documents Contradict Claim Email Spying Foiled Terror Plot.

Defenders of the American government’s online spying program known as “PRISM” claimed Friday that the suddenly controversial secret effort had saved New York City’s subways from a 2009 terrorist plot led by a young Afghan-American, Najibullah Zazi.

But British and American legal documents from 2010 and 2011 contradict that claim, which appears to be the latest in a long line of attempts to defend secret programs by making, at best, misleading claims that they were central to stopping terror plots. While the court documents don’t exclude the possibility that PRISM was somehow employed in the Zazi case, the documents show that old-fashioned police work, not data mining, was the tool that led counterterrorism agents to arrest Zazi. The public documents confirm doubts raised by the blogger Marcy Wheeler and the AP’s Adam Goldman, and call into question a defense of PRISM first floated by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, who suggested that PRISM had stopped a key terror plot.

Sorry, but its bad enough that the NSA spying appears to be governmental over-reach, the Obama administration has ZERO CREDIBLITY to oversee such a program. We’re supposed to believe than an IRS targeting scheme against Obama’s enemies could not also happen with NSA data gathered?