says White House panel member

NSA program stopped no terror attacks, says White House panel member

http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/12/19/21975158-nsa-program-stopped-no-terror-attacks-says-white-house-panel-m...

NSA program stopped no terror attacks, says White House panel member

Patrick Semansky / AP file

The National Security Agency campus in Fort Meade, Md.
By Michael Isikoff
NBC News National Investigative Correspondent

A member of the White House review panel on NSA surveillance said he was “absolutely” surprised when he discovered the agency’s lack of evidence that the bulk collection of telephone call records had thwarted any terrorist attacks.

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“It was, ‘Huh, hello? What are we doing here?’” said Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor, in an interview with NBC News. “The results were very thin.”

While Stone said the mass collection of telephone call records was a “logical program” from the NSA’s perspective, one question the White House panel was seeking to answer was whether it had actually stopped “any [terror attacks] that might have been really big.”

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