Okay, so we've already covered that the NSA has been attaining absolutely MASSIVE amounts of data and information on everything than everyone's doing in the US- and abroad too (Lookin' at you, Merkel). This begs the obvious question of what they're going to do with all of this data...And of course the response given by the NSA is that they're going to be using it to fight off the terrorists. Specifically the brown ones with the turbans, but those are randomly selected of course. Be that goal as it may, it could seem obvious how surveillance techniques would help. If we collected data on the terrorists and learned what they were plotting, obviously we could implement countermeasures to protect against a second 9/11 from occurring...right? Well, it's not as idyllically simple as that, unfortunately enough. The reason why the NSA is collecting so much data is because they can't be sure if any one little bit is the next clue to a terrorist attack. However, this means that they need to sift through all of the data in order to find this, and they only have a vague idea of what they're looking for. It's like searching for a needle in the Saharan desert, except the needle may not even exist in the first place. This work requires and incredible amount of manpower that the NSA only has a fraction of, leading to the vast amount of data either never being processed and simply shoved into the backfiles or being looked at months after it was ever relevant. This inept phenomenon is called information overload, and it's happening as I type this out right now. It's clearly not working, so why does the NSA continue to chug along? Find out next time, as the junior theme crusade continues...
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