Our review suggests that the information contributed to terrorist investigations by the use of section 215 telephony meta-data was not essential to preventing attacks and could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using conventional section 215 orders.
and on pp. 122-23:
It is noteworthy that the section 215 telephony meta-data program has made only a modestcontribution to the nation’s security. It is useful to compare it, for example, to the section 702 program, which we discuss in the next Part of our Report. Whereas collection under section 702 has produced significant information in many, perhaps most, of the 54 situations in which signals intelligence has contributed to the prevention of terrorist attacks since 2007, section 215 has generated relevant information in only a small number of cases, and there has been no instance in which NSA could say with confidence that the outcome would have been different without the section 215 telephony meta-data program. Moreover, now that the existence of the program has been disclosed publicly, we suspect that itis likely to be less useful still.
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