Chapter Six - Total Information OVERkill

CHAPTER SIX

Total Information OVERkill

AT SOME POINT, the NSA stopped collecting data for intelligence.

They started collecting it because they could.

The goal wasn’t to stop a specific threat anymore. It was to know everything, just in case some of it turned out useful later.
Which sounds smart until you realize they were drowning in information and didn’t know how to swim.

This was the era of “Total Information Awareness.”
That was an actual program name, by the way.
Like they just gave up on subtlety and went full Bond villain.

The plan? Build a system that could ingest everything — phone records, emails, travel logs, purchases, medical history, browser activity, facial recognition, you name it — and use AI (which didn’t really work yet) to find patterns before crimes happened.

Not after.
Before.

The NSA wanted to build pre-crime software.
Like Minority Report, but with worse UI.

They figured if they could just connect the dots — all the dots, ever — they’d spot terrorists before they bought the pressure cooker.

But here’s the catch.

When you collect everything, nothing stands out.

Thousands of real threats got buried under a mountain of birthday party invites, Amazon orders, and cat memes. Analysts were flooded. Alerts fired nonstop. Nobody could tell what was noise and what was doom.

And the tech didn’t help.

Most of the systems were duct-taped together. Some of them crashed constantly. Some flagged normal behavior as suspicious because someone forgot to define “normal.”
It was like giving a Roomba a sniper rifle and hoping for the best.

Meanwhile, the public was still in the dark.
The NSA told Congress, “Oh, we’re only collecting metadata.”
Which is like saying, “We’re not reading your diary, we’re just recording where you wrote it, when, for how long, and who you handed it to.”

Totally fine.

Inside the agency, there were people sounding alarms.
This is too much. This is inefficient. This is not helping.
They were ignored. Or sidelined. Or told, “Cool, we’ll build another dashboard and call it fusion.”

Because nobody wants to hear “stop” when the budget keeps growing.

And it did grow. Massive facilities got built just to house the storage racks. Entire desert complexes powered by their own power plants — just to keep the lights on while your high school selfies got archived for eternity.

The NSA didn’t become all-seeing.

They became all-hoarding.

And at a certain point, you have to ask:
If you’re watching everyone, but you can’t find anyone,
what the hell are you even doing?