U.S. security agency protecting American security? Say it ain't so!

Every once in a while, a headline comes along that leaves one scratching one's head and wondering just where the "news" part of this latest "news" is, and perhaps questioning the judgment of whoever found it worthy of publication.
It is in that peculiar judgment that, perhaps, the scandalous real story is to be found.
During Gulf War One, there was a brief flurry of hysteria at the revelation that some enemy troops killed in battle had actually died from being run over by U.S. armored vehicles, or from being buried as their fortifications were collapsed by oncoming tanks in the course of combat. The theory being, apparently, that this was somehow different from enemy troops being shot or blown up.
No kidding. For a good cycle and a half, this was actually considered news.
Of course, the only rational response seemed to be an incredulous "Yes...?
And...?"
It's a response that seems appropriate with disturbing frequency of late.
Today, you'll find yourself leaning forward expectantly for a long time, waiting for some mysterious other shoe to drop, if you read latest triumphal "expose" from Newsweek.
The May 2nd edition of the magazine reveals that the National Security Agency has been turning over the names of thousands of U.S. citizens which have come up in intercepts. Seems that, in its the course of its spying duties, the NSA sometimes comes across a few of them.
So, when other intelligence agencies, policymakers, law enforcement, the State Department and such, ask for those names, the NSA provides them.
The end.
That's it.
Now, here there would be two possible responses.
One of them would again be "Yes...?
And...?"
The other would be "Thank goodness!"
But the thrust of the article seems to indicate that this is somehow a bad thing.
This puzzle prompts further examination. Sure enough, reading the Newsweek story all the way through and starting back at the beginning reveals the real shocker. The authors had cleverly "buried the lead" right in the very first sentence, which starts out...

The National Security Agency is "not supposed to target Americans;"

Ah! This of course elicits a completely different response, to the effect of "Why the hell not?"
But wait. There's more.

...when a U.S. citizen's name comes up in an NSA "intercept," the agency routinely minimizes dissemination of the info by masking the name before it distributes the report to other U.S. agencies.

The article later clarifies that this even includes other U.S. intelligence agencies.
Bombshell.
Hello?
Intelligence screwup!
Bureaucracy!
Chinese wall!
Failure to share information!
September 11th!
Hello?
In case anybody's forgotten, and it seems some people certainly have, the investigation into the September 11th attacks revealed that it was precisely this type of ludicrous restriction on what kind of information intelligence, national security, and law enforcement agencies could give each other that made the terrorists' success possible!
Remember how that story ended? 3000 people died.
For example, the September 11th commission found that Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hamzi came into America in the summer of 2001. The CIA knew they were both Al Qaeda terrorists, but intelligence agents weren’t allowed to share their information with criminal investigators and the FBI couldn’t track them down.
…until after they crashed American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon.
One commission member, Democrat Richard Ben-Veniste said “The failure to thwart the 9/11 catastrohe was in part the result of the failure to communicate both internally and externally about information collected by our intelligence agencies.” It wasn’t just what they didn’t know. It was what they did know, and couldn’t tell each other!
Another commissioner, Former Navy Secretary John Lehman said "We need to ensure the fusion and sharing of all intelligence.”
Does that need to be repeated?
All intelligence.
All.
Yet Newsweek reports that

“names of U.S. citizens and officials (and citizens of other countries that help NSA eavesdrop around the world, including Britain, Canada and Australia)… initially were deleted from raw intercept reports."

Ben-Veniste hits it right on the head, just like Strother Martin. What we have here is a failure to communicate.
After a year of unraveling what went wrong, The Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Senator Richard Shelby wrote in December of 2002 that in the world of the intelligence community, the "IC," such monumental fiascos “demonstrate the need to ensure that intelligence analysis is conducted on a truly “all-source” basis by experts permitted to access all relevant information – no matter where in the IC it happens to reside.”
(Emphasis in original)
He said
"All."
"No matter where."
Now let’s return to that first sentence from Newsweek, written in 2005. “The NSA isn’t supposed to…”
These moronic bureacratic barriers were supposed to have been dismantled.
Now we see that at least some of those obstructions still stand, putting layers of paperwork between America's defenders and their ability to defend the country. And in the world of intelligence, paperwork makes for a barrier just as confounding as stone. It need only be as opaque as a blindfold.
Masking names, for example.
“Since the purpose of intelligence-gathering is to inform decision-making, restricting access inevitably degrades the value of having intelligence collectors in the first place,” Shelby observed, “depriving analysts of the information access they need in order to draw the inferences and develop the conclusions necessary to inform decision-making.”
Very importantly, Shelby speaks of "drawing inferences," analyzing, connecting dots.
So an intelligence agent or analyst can get access to a name just by asking? Who’s to say anyone will know to ask, for the right name, in the right place, on the right document, from the right intercept?
And yet, the barrier at the NSA persists.
Not only that, but here we also get complaints from the anti-Americans in the media, as well as those who Newsweek identifies as "civil libertarians" that some agencies are nonetheless managing to surmount those obstacles anyway.
Well ain't that a shame.
You would have thought we'd learned.
There's no indication whether any of the intercepts or names were per se connected to known terrorists or terrorist threats. The Newsweek story is silent on that question, but either way the distinction is utterly beside the point. The central issue is that even after the bloody lessons to which America has been subjected, parts of the bureaucratic culture still... still! ...have not caught up.
That may get still more people killed.
It's terrifyingly obvious that some "reforms" are in order, but not along the lines of what Newsweek's editorial thrust seems to imply.
We are at war. Hostile forces seeking to murder Americans by the thousands are still at work and, yes, they do leave clues. Those clues are all over the world in the places they go, the deals they do and the people with whom they associate, directly and indirectly. The continued existence of any barriers between those who would track those killers down and the clues that might make it possible to find them is suicidal insanity.
Shelby delivers a strong admonition to stop the insanity. “The American people will not forgive us if we fail to make the changes necessary to ensure that they are better protected in the future.”
In point of fact there is indeed something wrong with the NSA’s practices. If the agency comes across the names of U.S. citizens, or Britons, or Canadians, it should not be "releasing" those names to select other agencies upon request.
It should be sending them.
To everyone.
Highlighted. With sirens and strobe lights.
April 24, 2005