[Double_Cast]

I briefly met a guy who worked for US intelligence (can't remember specifics). I asked him about the NSA. First, he told me he couldn't say much. Then he said "Well I don't wanna brag, but the NSA really has caught a lot of terrorists, and is way more competent than the media makes them out to be." This leads me to believe that either: all these press articles paint a distorted picture; or the level of rationalization is pretty high.

[ollysb]

It also makes you wonder what those "terrorists" had actually done to warrant being captured.

[srean]

Being stupid suckers for set up set pieces, or searching for pressure cooker based recipes for quinoa (not enough to be arrested, sorry, gitmo'ized, but enough to be questioned)[0].

[0] HN comments on "Pressure cookers, backpacks, and quinoa, oh my" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140545

EDIT: @csandreasen I did not mean to imply that the quinoa incident was NSA related, but to give an example of what could happen as we veer deeper and deeper into a culture of surveillance and assumption of bad faith. Criminalization of sarcasm is another thing that will happen / has happened.

[csandreasen]

The "surveillance state looking for pressure cooker searches" ended up being complete paranoia and shoddy journalism. Yes, a New York man was visited by the police and questioned by local police regarding his Google searches for "pressure cookers" and "backpacks". It turned out that it was not an Orwellian surveillance state that tracked him down, but rather that the local police were following up when his employer viewed its own network logs, became suspicious and alerted the authorities.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2013/08/02/michele_ca...

[antman]

I have also heard many cases of terrorists being caught but most of them were simply searching on the Interner about it and some agent showed up and provided them with moral support the means and opportunity to attempt something thus becoming a terrorist. Indeed there have been many arrests. But most of then were not active terrorists before meeting with the agent. But they were terrorists in the legal sense of the term, since thinking about terrorism makes you a terrorist.