"PRISM Stopped Najibullah Zazi From Blowing Up Backpacks in the Subway."

New York Magazine reports:

But amid all the uproar yesterday and today, a report from CBS's John Miller — formerly of the FBI and a fairly plugged-in guy — went largely unnoticed.

"If you look at the Najibullah Zazi case, you have a classic example there. So on September 6, 2009, around dawn, an e-mail comes from an IP address to another IP address. One of them is nothing we're paying attention to. The other is one that has been flagged as an al Qaeda mail drop that is rarely used."

"And so when that bell rings, they say, 'Hey, they hardly ever use this account, but it's associated with Rashid Rauf, who is al Qaeda's master bomb maker, behind the plot to blow up all the airplanes, 'Who's he talking to?' And when they find out the other IP address on the other end resolves to Aurora, Colo., outside Denver, it connects them to Zazi, it takes them to the plot to blow up the New York subways, it's all prevented. That's how a program like this is supposed to work."...

Do you want that or not?

ADDED: Here's an article that questions whether PRISM is what caught Zazi. (Via Instapundit.) I'd seen that kind of questioning before I put up this post, but the New York Magazine piece says:

For what it's worth, the Telegraph has previously reported that Scotland Yard intercepted the e-mail, however, the U.K. reportedly also has access to PRISM.

Of course, opponents of PRISM have reason to want to deny that it's working to fight terrorism, even as its defenders are going to want to claim that it is. I'm not a proponent or an opponent at this point. I don't know enough, and — like Obama the President as opposed to Obama the Candidate/Senator — I believe it to be a complicated balance.