William Binney, a former NSA coder behind some of the surveillance program’s algorithms, is warning that the agency’s interest in mass surveillance is coming at a grave cost in efficiency.
While the agency sees value in taking in any data it can get, “just in case,” sorting through a stockpile of unrelated data is soaking up so many resources that what relevant data they might have is getting less focus.
Binney’s comments mirror warnings in some of the Snowden documents, which show the NSA is also concern about their data collection programs far outpacing their ability to process that data.
Indeed, in March some NSA analysts were asking for permission to collect less data with some of the programs, saying that they are collecting a lot of data with “relatively small intelligence value.”
