NSA located terrorist targets in Syria

Rowland Scarborough:

The U.S. ability to pinpoint with airstrikes the operational hubs of the al Qaeda offshoot Khorasan Group in Syria and penetrate one of its bombing plots shows the importance of the much-maligned National Security Agency, defense analysts said Tuesday.

The Khorasan Group is an especially hard target because, unlike other al Qaeda spinoffs, it stays in the shadows and refrains from pronouncements on social media. Its goal is to design explosives that can defeat airport security and blow up an airliner, killing hundreds of people. Its prime target: the United States.
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Defense analysts said that signals intelligence or Sigint — the result of intercepted communications — likely played a major role because developing spies in war-wracked Syria has been difficult at best and often results in unreliable information.

The NSA has weathered a barrage of criticism since last year, when rogue contractor Edward Snowden leaked to the news media reams of top-secret documents about how the Fort Meade, Maryland-based agency vacuums up mountains of phone and Internet data.

But U.S. airstrikes on the shadowy Khorasan Group’s operational centers show that America cannot fight a war on terrorism without electronic eavesdropping, analysts said.
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It is one element of intelligence gathering and is probably the most important in this war because it is so difficult to get human intelligence on this group of religious bigots.