content: You know how conspiritards always say that the news is a collection of facts edited to fit an agenda? This is a point where the mask has slipped. The great promise of this surveillance state is that it will prevent terrorism, despite the fact the "the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint, dude". By this logic, they had 5 years to put it all together. Five years in which they collected data and analyzed it. Now, they're somehow miraculously short by four days from a five year period? Sift through the five years of data proximate to the crime and process it as a crime. Perhaps by that definition of five years, they'd only be missing four days of data. But this isn't about missing data -- it's about justifying and expanding an unpopular surveillance program. Here's the truth, though. The NSA sucks at this. Why? Because its an impossible job. The NSA can budget any number of data centers, but there's a hundred thousand ways to pass a message. My concession is that the NSA can pick through all the metadata that they're going to pick through anyway, but the federal government should stop taxing anyone. Use the metadata to become supersneaky insider traders. Use the giant data centers in Utah to out-algorithm brokerage houses. Let the NSA do something useful and pay off the debt, because they're never going to prevent anything, nor would it be constitutional for them to do so. So far, all I've seen is that they take credit when nothing happens, just like presidents take credit for jobs they "saved".