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user-inactivated  ·  3979 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The first congressman to battle the NSA is dead. No one noticed; no one cares.

    Did those risky and expensive intelligence operations make the United States safer? Did they prevent attacks on America or American interests, or correctly warn the White House of some impending crisis? To answer that, Pike looked into some major world events to see how US intelligence fared: The 1973 Yom Kippur War; Turkey’s 1974 invasion of Cyprus; and the 1974 coup in Portugal (as well as the US intelligence failure in the 1968 Tet Offensive).

    The answers were devastating and embarrassing—in every instance, US intelligence failed miserably.

Am I naive for still, against all odds, thinking we might be falling afoul of selection bias here? Fuck, they've got to be doing something.