Tales of the Vienna Woods

Via Geeks of Doom.

Why do you suppose the NSA didn't know whether young Mr. Snowden was on President Morales's plane or not? Don't they know everything? Have those fiendishly clever Bolivians come up with some technique for defeating American omniscience?

Apparently (thanks to Wyden and Udall, via Emptywheel) all the cool hardware just doesn't work very well.

We are quite familiar with the bulk email records collection program that operated under the USA Patriot Act and has now been confirmed by senior intelligence officials. We were very concerned about this program’s impact on Americans’ civil liberties and privacy rights, and we spent a significant portion of 2011 pressing intelligence officials to provide evidence of its effectiveness. They were unable to do so, and the program was shut down that year....

intelligence agencies’ assessments of the usefulness of particular collection programs – even significant ones – are not always accurate. This experience has also led us to be skeptical of claims about the value of the bulk phone records collection program in particular.

Who could have suspected?