Last year, Barack Obama tasked the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board with reviewing the NSA’s mass surveillance programs for legality and effectiveness. Well, Thursday, the board said that the collection of all telephone records is illegal, useless and should be ended. “We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation,” said the report. Meanwhile, the Justice Department claims that USIS, the private contractor that conducts background checks for federal employees, including Edward Snowden, faked 665,000 checks – or 40% – since 2008. Maybe the NSA should narrow its focus to federal employees.