Inefficient: Snooping NSA Surveillance Program Failed to Invade Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Privacy

Maybe if the National Security Agency had noticed the Boston bomber’s visits to al Qaeda’s magazine or ‘Terrorist’ YouTube videos and stopped him, Edward Snowden wouldn’t have become a leaker.

One person whose privacy was not invaded by U.S. intelligence was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, as he repeatedly visited the al Qaeda online magazine Inspire for its recipe “Build a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”

Even after Russian intelligence asked the FBI to investigate Tsarnaev, the huge databases our intelligence services maintain in the name of our national security failed to alert the agents to Tsarnaev’s interest in building the pressure cooker bombs he would use to devastating effect at the Boston Marathon.

In the immediate aftermath of the Boston bombings, investigators did not fail to note similarities between those devices and the one described in Inspire. But the first solid intelligence specifically linking Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the magazine’s recipe came not from Big Brother but from his little bother, Dzhokhar, when he was interviewed by agents after allegedly helping to carry out the attack.

Read more: thedailybeast.com