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While soaking up the lion’s share of the $40 billion annual intel budget, the NSA continues to preside over an antiquated cold-war apparatus, one designed to listen in on official communications pipelines in nation-states. Today it is overwhelmed by cell-phone and Internet traffic. While terror groups multiply, the NSA is still waiting for the next Soviet Union to arise (which many in the Pentagon see as China, say, 50 to 100 years from now). As a December 2002 report by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee noted, "Only a tiny fraction" of the NSA’s 650 million daily intercepts worldwide "are actually ever reviewed by humans, and much of what is collected gets lost in the deluge of data."

What’s needed is a fundamental rethinking that would put some of those billions of dollars that go into NSA’s global surveillance into more human intelligence and Internet surveillance instead. But that’s not happening. "There’s no question that technology changes have created a tidal-wave type of problem," says one former senior NSA official. "NSA’s been talking about it for 10 years at least. Will they ever get in front of it? No."

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Today, by contrast, every intelligence agency is a glandular monstrosity left over from a half century of world war and cold war. The FBI, CIA, NSA and other agencies spend most of their energy defending their own turf, rather than American turf. "The bottom line here is entire system has been built up incrementally over 50 years as part of what Eisenhower warned about, the military-industrial complex," says Steele. "The system is on automatic pilot." Ed Giorgio agrees. "There are sacred cows, enormously expensive endeavors costing billions year, being done in space and elsewhere," says Giorgio. "You’re not going to find a terrorist by looking for one in space."

Only one person has the power to slice through the bureaucratic inertia and set real reform in motion: the president of the United States. But to do so, of course, could put the permanent war in jeopardy. And if you’re a "war president," as Bush describes himself, and you want to reassert presidential power, as he does, then permanent war can be a good thing. Perhaps that is why Karl Rove, with his war-works-for-the-GOP campaign strategy for 2006, looks so happy these days. Perhaps it is why the president—who once dismissed Osama bin Laden as unimportant as he diverted the nation’s attention and resources to Iraq—now says that Americans should take the mastermind of 9/11 "seriously." (Wasn’t it just Groundhog Day recently?) Perhaps it is why the Bush administration is now devoting so much to its military buildup while stripping critical education programs needed to make America more competitive, insisting on permanent tax cuts and ensuring monster deficits for decades.

Wait a minute. Drawing the lone superpower into an endless global struggle, draining it of its wealth and will … that was Osama bin Laden’s strategic goal, right? Didn’t we have some intelligence on that once?

In the mass roundup of more than 1,200 people shortly after 9/11, for example, it took very little for a Muslim or Arab illegal immigrant to be considered a "suspected terrorist," according to a 2003 report by the Justice Department's inspector general. Arab students were locked up as suspected terrorists for working at pizza parlors (in violation of their student visas); a Pakistani immigrant was jailed after attracting attention because he and his Queens housemates let their grass grow long and hung their underwear out to dry on the fence...
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The Department of Homeland Security in May 2003 urged 18,000 local and state police departments to treat critics of the war on terror as potential terrorists, according to a confidential DHS memo made public in 2004.
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The Transportation Security Administration is also extremely arbitrary in how it designates names for its "no-fly" list. There are an estimated 70,000 names in the registry — many of them stuck there for reasons that even the government cannot explain. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) were placed on the list. Everyone with the common name of "David Nelson" is treated like a would-be bomber — as are 4-year-old children unlucky enough to have a name matching one on the list.