“You know this is a key question that the 9/11 commission considered, and what they found in the postmortem when they looked at all the classified intelligence from all the different intelligence agencies, they found that we had all of the information we needed as an intelligence community, as a classified sector, as the national defense of the United States, to detect this plot,” Snowden said.

“We actually had records of the phone calls from the United States and out. The CIA knew who these guys were. The problem was not that we weren’t collecting information, it wasn’t that we didn’t have enough dots, it wasn’t that we didn’t have a haystack, it was that we did not understand the haystack that we had.”

‘If we’re missing things like the Boston Marathon bombings where all of these mass-surveillance systems, every domestic dragnet in the world, didn’t reveal guys that the Russian intelligence service told us about by name, is that really the best way to protect our country or are we trying to throw money at a magic solution that’s actually not just costing us our safety, but our rights and our way of life,” Snowden said.

That good enough for ya?

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

"a key question that the 9/11 commission considered, and what they found in the postmortem"

You understand the function of this phrase in the context above, yes?

They knew building 7 was wired with explosives because a landlord wanted to cash in on an insurance claim, and some government agencies wanted some files destroyed?

And if you are going to say it was LIHOP, then the conclusion is that our intelligence agencies were working just fine and in fact DID uncover the 9/11 plot, but they were intentionally ignored by the top of the executive branch. If that's what you believe, then you can't say the intelligence efforts weren't working properly.

But it appears from this segment that Mr. Snowden endorses the findings of the 9/11 Commission, that the system was blinking red, and was ignored.

If that is the case, the problem was not with the system.