The National Security Agency's recently revealed mass-level surveillance programmes reportedly had a 'minimal' contribution in the investigation of 225 terrorism cases, a new study has claimed.
According to Mashable, Obama had claimed to have knowledge of at least 50 threats that had been averted because of the snoop data, while Alexander had said that the programmes helped the agency foil close to 54 attacks.
However, the study published by the New America Foundation has revealed that the government's claims about the role of NSA's 'bulk' surveillance of web and phone data in Prism and metadata programmes are overblown and even misleading.
Researchers, headed by Peter Bergenm, who also interviewed Osama Bin Laden in 1997, have found that traditional investigative methods, such as the use of informants and targeted intelligence operations, provided the initial impetus for investigations in the majority of cases, while the contribution of NSA's bulk surveillance programs to these cases was minimal.
The study found that NSA's phone metadata programme had an impact on 1.8 percent of terrorism investigations, while PRISM had an impact on 4.4 percent cases.
It was further found that the 1.8 percent of terrorism investigation refers to only one case in which four suspects were convicted of sending 8,500 dollars to Somali terrorist group Al Shabaab, but no actual terrorist attack was alleged in the case.
The researchers opined that the overall problem for US counterterrorism officials is not that they need vaster amounts of information from the bulk surveillance programs, but that they don't sufficiently understand or widely share the information they already possess.
