As it now appears, the NSA can not cope with the processing of large volumes of traffic too, which come into its system, and in 2013 the agency has asked to reduce the extent of the surveillance program MUSCULAR.
“Their current activities reduces the performance of the system when they process all the data,” - said William Binnie (William Binney), a developer of software that is used in the NSA, told WSJ.
According to him, the NSA mired in an array of unnecessary information, which prevents the agency to carry out useful work in search of potential terrorists.
Not surprisingly, some experts have expressed the view that the total surveillance of citizens, including the collection and analysis of all metadata Internet traffic, not helped to prevent a single terrorist act.
William Binnie virtually unknown to the public, unlike Edward Snowden. Nevertheless, he worked for the NSA for over 30 years and its current indications are not less weight than documents published by Snowden.
Anyway, but the NSA solves the problem on its own. They believe that to handle increasing volumes of traffic need to increase computing power and build new data centers. For example, now in Utah finishes construction of a giant NSA data center. But this is unlikely to be able to solve the problem, because the traffic on the Internet is growing too rapidly.
Documents published by Edward Snowden and dated 2012, the year also indicate that the NSA representatives complain that collect metadata from foreign mobile phones “outstrip our ability to its processing and storage.”
As William Binnie said, in response to complaints about the lack of technical means for data processing NSA was instructed to reduce the amount of surveillance, not to collect information on all citizens, and to focus on the surveillance of those who “may pose a threat to the state and its allies.” Agency recommended the development of software for a more “intelligent” filtering the collected metadata.
