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So here again the Obama administration is caught in another lie. They are reading emails.

Yes,  jihadists must be monitored.  Their emails should be read. But the Obama administration refuses to identify jihad as the cause of these attacks in America (and abroad). He thinks that by denying jihad, that gives him cover to spy on all Americans. How diabolical.

NSA phone spying program FOILED plan to blow up New York City subway, claim under fire security officials NSA domestic spying program foiled 2009 NYC subway bombing plot Daily Mail, June 9, 2010 (hat tip Lynn)

  • Government program credited by Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., House Intelligence Committee head, with thwarting planned attack
  • Alleged terrorist found out after emailing known Al-Qaeda leader in Pakistan for help making a bomb
  • Attack stopped as a result of collaboration between US and British intelligence agencies

The government’s broad programs to collect U.S. phone records and Internet traffic helped disrupt a 2009 plot to bomb the New York City subways, a senior U.S. intelligence official said. But the assertion raises as many questions as it answers because court testimony indicated the subway plot investigation began with an email.

Over the past days, The Guardian newspaper and The Washington Post have revealed classified documents showing how the National Security Agency sweeps up phone records and Internet data in its hunt for terrorists. Those programs have come under criticism from civil libertarians and some in Congress who say they were too broad and collected too much about innocent Americans.

Busted: NYC terror suspect Najibullah Zazi arrives in 2009 at the federal building for questioning by the FBI in Denver

In one of those programs, the NSA’s collected daily records of millions of phone calls made and received by U.S. citizens not suspected of any wrongdoing.

On Thursday, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., who leads the House Intelligence Committee, credited that effort with thwarting a terrorism plot. But he did not elaborate.

Afghan-American Najibullah Zazi pleaded guilty in the 2009 plot, saying he had been recruited by al-Qaida in Pakistan.

Safe: The NSA’s domestic spying program stopped an alleged terror plot planned against the New York City subway system

The break in that case came, according to court documents and testimony, when Zazi emailed a Yahoo address seeking help with his bomb recipe.

At that time, British intelligence officials knew the Yahoo address was associated with an al-Qaida leader in Pakistan. That’s because, according to British government documents released in 2010, officials had discovered it on the computer of a terror suspect there months earlier. Because the NSA and British intelligence work so closely together and so little is known about how the NSA monitors email traffic, it’s possible that both agencies were monitoring the Yahoo address at the time Zazi sent the critical email in 2009.

A-OK: There have been no successful terrorist attacks in new York City since 9/11, perhaps in part due to the NSA’s ‘PRISM@ program

What’s unclear, though, is how the phone program aided the investigation, which utilized court-authorized wiretaps of Zazi and his friends.

Based on what’s known about the phone-records program, the NSA might have had an archive of all the phone calls Zazi had made, which might have helped authorities look for possible co-conspirators.

Because the phone program remains classified, however, it’s impossible to say with certainty how the program benefited the investigation.

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