I am going to save the administration some time. I am actively plotting to topple the Washington Monument…with a nail file. I have a bet that I can accomplish this before my brother succeeds with his plan to collapse the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River…with a blow torch.

There it is. I have confessed my evil plan. Now I probably won’t have the opportunity to collect my money. I now realize the NSA can read my emails without a warrant or any oversight. I suppose getting the chance to start filing was always doubtful. What was I thinking? They probably are well aware of my plan. So, I decided to just make it public. Most likely, they have a Special Agent of the FBI staking out my local Walgreen’s, just waiting for me to purchase my terrorist’s materials. I’d never get away with it.

That’s just the way it is in today’s America. The New York Times explains it all:

In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans’ international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans’ privacy.

Frankly, I am more concerned about why I have not been visited by an agent. I have been plotting this nail filing thing for four years. Just check my email! And yet, they claim some guy had the exact same plan as my brother.

…along with several British counterterrorism officials, some of the officials questioned assertions by the Bush administration that the [NSA] program was the key to uncovering a plot to detonate fertilizer bombs in London in 2004. The F.B.I. and other law enforcement officials also expressed doubts about the importance of the program’s role in another case named by administration officials as a success in the fight against terrorism, an aborted scheme to topple the Brooklyn Bridge with a blow torch.

Some officials said that in both cases, they had already learned of the plans through interrogation of prisoners or other means.

I called my brother and he says he hasn’t heard ‘peep’ from the FBI. Maybe this is why.

the results of the program look very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret program and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive.

“We’d chase a number, find it’s a schoolteacher with no indication they’ve ever been involved in international terrorism – case closed,” said one former F.B.I. official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. “After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration.”

Here’s the thing. I have a friend that is a schoolteacher. He’s never been involved in international terrorism. But he has this plan to flatten the White House with a steel frisbee. He’s been grinding that puppy in his garage for TWO years. He called me last November and told me about it. The FBI hasn’t visited him either. I think they are too swamped.

Aside from the director, F.B.I. officials did not question the legal status of the tips, assuming that N.S.A. lawyers had approved. They were more concerned about the quality and quantity of the material, which produced “mountains of paperwork” often more like raw data than conventional investigative leads.

“It affected the F.B.I. in the sense that they had to devote so many resources to tracking every single one of these leads, and, in my experience, they were all dry leads,” the former senior prosecutor said. “A trained investigator never would have devoted the resources to take those leads to the next level, but after 9/11, you had to.”

That’s why I am abandoning my plot to nailfile the Washington Monument in half. I’m sure the NSA already knows about it, but the FBI just hasn’t had time to arrest me. By confessing now, that guy down at Walgreen’s can go work on a more important case. And maybe they’ll give me less than 20 years.

By the administration’s account, the N.S.A. eavesdropping helped lead investigators to Iyman Faris, an Ohio truck driver and friend of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is believed to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Faris spoke of toppling the Brooklyn Bridge by taking a torch to its suspension cables, but concluded that it would not work. He is now serving a 20-year sentence in a federal prison.

With any luck, my brother, my friend, and I can share bunks with Iyman Faris. We’ll swap stories about all the great plans we had, and how they went awry.

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