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SALT LAKE CITY — What is the value of the government collecting information if it isn't going to protect us? If the federal government can spy on the whole world—including Americans—in unprecedented ways, then why couldn't it have stopped deadly terror attacks in Benghazi and Boston?
The National Security Agency can see our private emails, listen to our personal phone calls and see everything on our phones, and then store all of that digital information.
But an organization with all that data still couldn't stop the Benghazi attack a year ago today, or the Boston Marathon bombing. One student says Benghazi didn't just slip through the cracks.
"It slipped through the Grand Canyon," said first-year University of Utah law student Jonathon Green.
He and some of his classmates at the S.J. Quinney School of Law contend that the Feds' attention should have been better focused on Boston and Benghazi. But they may not have all the eyes we think they do.
"It takes a lot of manpower and energy just to figure out if someone is really doing anything bad," said ABC News Crime and Terrorism Analyst Brad Garrett.
You had an upper-level State Department official saying that he thought the security was adequate. Obviously, it was not.
–ABC News Crime and Terrorism Analyst Brad Garrett
He adds that the NSA stores much of the digital information it collects for later, because reviewing every single bit of it is nearly impossible.
"They look for key words in emails and phone numbers that will link people here to bad guys overseas," Garrett said, and that made easier work for the Tsarnaev brothers, accused of pulling off the Boston bombings. "They were effective as sort of operating under the radar."
In Benghazi, Garrett says the State Department knew agreements with security contractors were expiring a month before attackers would kill an ambassador and three other men.
"You had an upper-level State Department official saying that he thought the security was adequate," Garrett said. "Obviously, it was not."
Is all the surveillance of ordinary Americans worth it, financially? A study in the book "Terror, Security and Money" says we would need almost 1,700 attacks like 9/11 to justify Homeland Security's projected spending of $1 trillion over the next decade. But U. law student Alexa Mareschal says kids today make it easy for internal spying, anyway.
"This generation is used to this surveillance, complacent, although the previous was not," she said.
U. Law Professor Wayne McCormack says Microsoft, Apple and similar companies could produce tougher encryption techniques.
"But if they get together, you've got a private business enterprise that's probably more powerful than any of the governments," he said, and they may not like that.
So, McCormack recommends, if Americans want to stand up to excessive surveillance, "Say, look, we're willing to take a little bit of threat of harm in order to have that privacy."
