Claim on “Attacks Thwarted” by NSA Spreads Despite Lack of Evidence

Two weeks after Edward Snowden’s first revelations about sweeping government surveillance, President Barack Obama shot back. “We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information not just in the United States, but, in some cases, threats here in Germany,” President Obama said during a visit to Berlin in June 2013. “So lives have been saved.” Since then, intelligence officials, media outlets, and members of Congress from both parties all repeated versions of the claim that National Security Agency surveillance has stopped more than 50 terrorist attacks. The figure has become a key talking point in the debate around the spying programs. “Fifty-four times this and the other program stopped and thwarted terrorist attacks both here and in Europe -- saving real lives,” said House Intelligence Committee Mike Rogers (R-MI) on the House floor in July. But there's no evidence that the oft-cited figure is accurate.

The NSA itself has been inconsistent on how many plots it has helped prevent and what role the surveillance programs played. The agency has often made hedged statements that avoid any sweeping assertions about attacks thwarted. A chart declassified by the agency in July, for example, says that intelligence from the programs on 54 occasions “has contributed to the [US government’s] understanding of terrorism activities and, in many cases, has enabled the disruption of potential terrorist events at home and abroad” -- a much different claim than asserting that the programs have been responsible for thwarting 54 attacks. NSA officials have mostly repeated versions of this wording. When NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander spoke at a Las Vegas security conference in July, for instance, he referred to “54 different terrorist-related activities,” 42 of which were plots and 12 of which were cases in which individuals provided “material support” to terrorism.