Isn't it rather absurd to believe that the US was caught completely off guard by 911, when they had Echelon?

Question

The US had possessed electronic surveillance data mining programs capable of intercepting any electronic transmission or data stream from anywhere in the world for at least a decade prior to 911.

Echelon, and then Carnivore (developed in 1998), are the interception programs the US utilizes. They can "sniff" through literally millions of communications and can even reconstruct a web page view exactly as the user had viewed it. So for instance, if they had locked onto your communications they could reconstruct an identical copy of the page you're viewing now.

Even with encryption, the US was more than capable of monitoring and mining all of A-Q's electronic transmissions for several years before 911. They didn't need FBI field agents to do the legwork, they had the electronic capability already.

So isn't it a bit implausible that the US had no foreknowledge of the 911 plans?

They also had keystroke loggers (like surveillance on the keys typed on your keyboard) that they could attach remotely without even having physical contact with the suspect's computer, leaving the suspect entirely unaware that he was being monitored.

They possessed this technology for several years prior to 911, yet why did they not attach it to the suspect's computers once they located the suspect?

If you have the technology and don't use it on a known terrorist suspect, what does that say about your actual intention of stopping a planned crime?

Well seeing as how the US gov't has possessed the Echelon program since at least 1988 before Clinton was even President, I imagine they had plenty more things they were surveilling than Clinton's enemies.

Heh, thanks for the warning Jen, but I had foreknowledge of that before I even posted this.

The way I look at it, the more strident and insulting the comments are, that generally implies to me that I'm striking pretty close to a scary area for those trying to shout me down...

That of credible doubt.

Answer 1

Interesting information. Be prepared to get lambasted. There seems to be very little actual defense of the opposite side of this debate, just name calling and insults.

Answer 2

It is a good theory, but those programs would not have helped them stop the terrorist any way because first rule in performing an attack is Opsec....I am sure you know what that is....and if not let me explain it.....Opsec is operational security which means you dont say, talk about, type messages or in any way draw attention to the plan. Also you would have to take in to account that Echelon and Carnivore are both ran by the NSA which doesnt get along with other groups like the C.I.A. or F.B.I. so any such information gathered would not have been turned over any way. Do I believe that the USA was caught off guard.....that is hard to explain for as I speak I could be having these words snooped upon.....so I like your theory but you have several holes in it but do i think your headed in the wrong direction...oh no i see what your getting at but you must also consider that we were caught off guard because it was an inside job which would also make the use of Echelon and Carnivore absolute because any traffic transmitted would have been false information to not only direct the revenge for such attacks against certain groups but would also be used to lead people to think it was someone else in other words Psycops....

Answer 3

The defense department has its own version of eschelon, called Condor. You should purchase a device called a keeper and you too can spy on anyone of your choice. You simply call that persons number and when they open the receiver they hear nothing and then when they hang up the keeper device keeps the line open and you can listen to what ever is within earshot of the phone receiver. And it doesn't prevent any further calls from going through, so they never know they are under surveillance from that point onward. You can purchase these device from a little place in Arizona. The government has legally been spying on Americans since the fifties by a law that enables them to listen for obscene words used on phone lines, so they monitor phone calls at random and hit record whenever they hear certain select words used! As for foreknowledge they were the ones that initiated the attacks in the first place!

Answer 4

the trouble with it is interpretation, while you have the infornmation you have to figure out what it means. Presumably if you said i am going to blow up a building it would be picked up however , most terrorists arnt that stupid. The use of code words has been knopw for many thousands of years. While some of these people were know to be terrorist supporters it wasnt known that they would mopve from passive to active. The lists of passive or possible terrorist supporters is many of 100 000's names long. In short the USA does not have , did it have nor will it ever have the capability to anyaise all the data, unless an individual is targeted. While carnivor does in deed hamper terroist activity an annoynmous person in an internet cafe in pakistan talking about his laundry being taken to his mother, which may infact be an order to hi jack an aircraft.

Answer 5

The kind of programs you speak of have been the holy grail of ElInt for decades, but they still have yet to perform to thier dreamed-of potential. The US was caught off guard, in part, because it had come to put so much faith in electronic intelligence over human intelligence, and the elint just didn't live up to the hype.

Answer 6

The terrorists knows it... And do other ways to prevent those messages to be intercepted... You must have forgot that Laden was trained by your own CIA, so he knew about this thing...
For exemple, instead of sending e-mails, they built private websites that when visited by another terrorist, it request a special password and the message appear on the site... So their is no downloading and nothing to intercept... Echelon is great, but can't catch all the fishes... Your NSA is better at it... But they mainly good at deciphering encrypted messages...

Answer 7

The Clinton people informed the Bush people that something was afoot with Bin Laden and to watch out for something like that. The Bush people chose to ignore the passdown.

Answer 8

turn your fan on sluggish-action and picture a droplet of rain splitting upon the sting of a shifting blade into 700 thousand droplets all on separate trajectories, some colliding and forming somewhat larger droplets, and unexpectedly you're conscious and in a position to understand that in case you have been tiny adequate you may desire to choose for a quick sluggish-action holiday interior certainly one of them because it hurled away in the direction of an unknown holiday spot or perhaps even though it might desire to look to take mere seconds for that droplet to fall, it truly is as though it have been 4 million years for the universe interior.

Answer 9

Yes and they had no idea where and when, People told them for years this sort of thing would happen so we should have been on guard.
Today due to our lack of foreign policy you are even less safe than 911. Vote

Answer 10

No forewarning. You assume with the millions of cryptic signals floating about, the government could crack this plot. Unfortunately, OBL and his evil group were pretty damn smart.