"Agents work in the interests of the state," he said, adding that "90percentt" of all intelligence was collected with the collaboration of ordinary citizens.
Tom Ridge, director of homeland security; George Tenet, director of central intelligence; Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director; and Attorney General John Ashcroft were each advised of the threat soon after the intelligence was collected.
If a terrorism suspect in Pakistan is having conversations with someone on a computer with a New York Internet protocol address via a chat room run by an Internet service provider in London, where exactly is the intelligence being collected?
(As recently as December, U.S. intelligence was collecting evidence of mid-level contacts between the I.S.I. and Taliban factions fighting in Afghanistan).
Costos referred to an internal review ordered by Barack Obama to ensure that the intelligence that is collected is "intelligence that should and needs to be collected".
However, more than two years later, on Nov. 16, 2005, Pelosi stated correctly that on the basis of her "many years on the intelligence committee," she knew that "[t]he quality of intelligence that is collected by torture is... uncorroborated and it is worthless".
"There's a very high volume of intelligence shared, some of which is collected automatically, so it's impossible to track what every piece is potentially used for," said Mr. Aldrich, who is also the author of a history of the Government Communications Headquarters, the British signal-intelligence agency.
This was, in part, why the Central Intelligence Agency was created, in 1947 — to insure that all intelligence would be collected and processed in one place.
He added that the intelligence had been collected as the undercover officers were spying on what he said were "violent protest groups" campaigning for a proper police investigation into the teenager's murder.
