Surrendering Our Privacy for What?

The latest on all the good work the NSA is doing to protect us from terrorism:

“We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation,” said the report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. “Moreover, we are aware of no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack.”

....In its assessment of the program’s value, the board scrutinized 12 terrorism cases cited by the intelligence community that involved information obtained through the Section 215 program. Even in cases where the data related to contacts of a known terrorism suspect, in nearly all of them the benefits were minimal—“generally limited to corroborating information that was obtained independently by the FBI,” the report said.

This is from a new commission report on the government's spying under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.