Mass surveillance doesn’t prevent terror.
Granick 17 – [Jennifer Stisa Granick is Director of Civil Liberties at Stanford Law School. She practices, speaks, and writes about computer crime and security, electronic surveillance, consumer privacy, and data protection; "Mass Spying Isn’t Just Intrusive," 3-2-2017, WIRED, https://www.wired.com/2017/03/mass-spying-isnt-just-intrusive-ineffective/]
But the track record of the collection programs Edward Snowden revealed provides little evidence that massive surveillance will help us identify future terrorist attacks or mitigate these new risks. American spies’ allegiance to massive surveillance is based on faith, not track record. The Boston Marathon bombing in April of 2013 illustrates how broad proactive surveillance is no panacea against attacks. The NSA was conducting its massive spying at the time, and the attacks happened anyway.
In that case, two brothers allegedly built pressure cooker bombs and placed them near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The bombings killed three people and injured scores of others. The older brother died and the younger brother was injured in the subsequent manhunt. The younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was sentenced to death in early 2015. Relevant information about the bombers did not come from electronic surveillance. Rather, it came from another government. A few years before the bombing, the Russian government had warned the FBI that the older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was dangerous. The FBI investigated and found nothing to link either person to terrorism, so they closed the investigation in June 2011. But later that same year, the Russians sent the same warning to the CIA.