James Clapper Still Trying To Distance Intelligence Community From The Bogus 'Foiled Plots' Metric He Came Up With

from the but-of-course dept

In the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Wednesday, where James Clapper effectively accused journalists who reported on the Snowden documents of being criminals, he also tried to distance himself from the fact that the NSA's surveillance activities have been basically useless. During the hearing, he attempted to claim that looking at "foiled plots" is the "wrong metric."

Clapper answered by saying "it's an important tool," but he also added that "simply using the metric of plots foiled is not necessarily a way to get at the value of the program."

This is not the first time he's tried this. Last year, he started claiming that "peace of mind" was the better metric. Of course, that resulted in people pointing out that it would provide a lot more "peace of mind" if the NSA weren't collecting all of our information all the time.

But there's another issue here, which is that the only reason why Clapper has to now try to distance himself from is because he and Keith Alexander made it the metric by trotting out the whole bogus 54 "terrorist events foiled" line to defend the program -- only to see that number fall apart under scrutiny to the point that it showed the bulk metadata collection had basically stopped no US terrorist plots at all.

So, sure, Clapper wants to get away from that number now. But, perhaps he should have not brought it up in the first place in trying to defend the program...

Filed Under: foiled plots, james clapper, metrics, nsa, surveillance