It's depressing that this article is so high on HN right now. It's another example of a poor report trivializing an important debate. Meanwhile, many of the comments here are snarky and sardonic which further degrades the dialog. This is a serious subject and should be treated as such.
It's easy to shout hurray for your side. It's easy to demonize your enemy. According to the government, Snowden is a traitor. According to many frequent HN readers, the government is completely out of the control. Neither of these claims is true, but they are difficult to get past.
Although Snowden is certainly not a traitor, the accusation is serious. His life and freedom hang in the balance. Politicians and political pundits are looking for an easy solution when they demonize Snowden. Making him out to be the enemy makes it easier to keep the country calm about the issues he unveiled.
While Snowden isn't a monster, the surveillance programs are not evil either. They are shocking. They evoke emotional response. They can be frightening -- especially since we don't know how much deeper the programs go. Still, they are the largely the result of people trying to defend the country from terrorism. Regardless of the cynicism you bring to the topic, the primary goal of these programs is to save lives. Accept that, take a breath, then reevaluate your grievances.
I'm not suggesting that there's nothing to be angry or worried about. I'm certainly not saying that the programs are right or benevolent. I'm saying that this is important and meaningful and needs to be treated as such rather than another opportunity to win points in some silly political game.
I don't agree with your statement that the surveillance programs are not evil because their goal is to save lives. Essentially nobody is intentionally evil. There's a reason we say "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions", and it's not because we're all civil engineering aficionados.
Evil can and does arise from people trying to do their best to make the world a better place. To say that the program isn't evil because it's trying to save lives is incredibly dangerous.
At the risk of triggering a Godwin, let's all recall that Hitler rose to power "trying to defend the country from terrorism". We probably don't have any nascent Hitlers, but we certainly have people who will abuse power if they get it, and ignoring people with good intentions will make them impossible to detect.
That's not even entirely relevant. Others have pointed to the example of J. Edgar Hoover, which is highly relevant. Imagine not a figurehead, or an evil president, imagine merely an ambitious civil functionary who abuses and misuses his secret powers outside of any oversight.
I think people overlook this because it seems too far-fetched. But I don't think it's so outrageous that it shouldn't be considered. And whether the system is being used for these purposes or not, the fact that a system exists that could is a very dangerous situation.
Insofar as national policy is overdetermined, who the president happens to be for a given term is irrelevant. So the question becomes, is the surveillance state overdetermined? There's certainly a strong collation behind it--the money alone makes it so. I suspect the president has very little freedom in these matters.
Yet I wonder who's on the other side. Have all the major players just said, "sure, that works for me?" Surely someone powerful feels the risk.
Remember that it wasn't the Washington Post that drove Nixon's disgrace, it was the FBI using the Post as an instrument. It was government feuding, and I wonder if this latest episode is another instance of feuding. Maybe I hope it is.
Imagining is fun because it doesn't require facts or logic. Pasting Nixon on to the current situation, while mildly amusing, does not clarify what is actually occuring. It is still far from clear. Is there a solid piece of evidence that Snowden is holding back for dramatic effect? Not releasing it, if he has it, lets the story become a mockery of itself because without any facts all you are left with is your imagination.
I sometimes amuse myself by thinking about how Nixon would be far too liberal to get elected today. Of course, a Nixon coming of age in today's climate might be quite different.
This. As cliché as it may sound, John Dalberg-Acton was very very accurate when he said ""Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Right now, the way this agency is being run and the way it is being handed power by the few in Congress that know all the details is as close to absolute informational power as you can have.
The difference is Nixon did this illegally while Obama cleared everything through those ridiculous secret courts. He has carte blanche to trample on the constitution all he wants
I see no difference at all. Nixon did something illegal and Obama wrote "this is legal" on a piece of paper that few people get to see. Hell, how do you know Nixon didn't scribble something in his private bathroom that said what he was doing was legal?
There's an important difference, in that Obama is using authority granted him by Congress and affirmed by the courts, whereas Nixon did his stuff independently of the other branches of government.
The consequences of this can be seen in what happened when they were found out. Nixon got drummed out of office, while Obama gets essentially a free pass. Sure, Congress is asking a few inconvenient questions, but about unimportant details.
Unchecked power corrupts anybody that uses it. Obama should have closed these secret courts that authorize drone murder and mass spying the moment he took office, now it seems he's been sucked in and corrupted just like anybody else in his position.
Its not just domestic spying either, there is a whole gov propaganda chorus on social media to influence discussion and squash dissent run by centcom. At first they "promised" it would not be used domestically but if you were to go looking around twitter and online media comments you will easily find the centcom puppets demonizing and discrediting Snowden, drowning out the issues he leaked which is criminal domestic surveillance
I'm not sure if its corruption/venality or if its the fact that he has a wife and kids that keep him from going up against those who seem to hold the true power but one way or another it's deeply disappointing.
He wouldn't really be interested in shutting down secret courts that authorize *the behavior he is interested in perusing". It wasn't Dubya who brought back assassination, it was Obama.
Just how many lives has terrorism claimed in the past decade?
Smoking has probably claimed more lives just today than terrorist attacks on US soil in the past decade. So I don't think it warrants any action at all.
Let's face it the aim of terrorism is to scare people and if we are so scared that we're giving away basic human rights (and correspondence secrecy is a basic human right) then the terrorist won.
"Decade" is a very convenient window. How about 15 years (or even 12)?
Also, smoking is an awful example because - due to the dishonesty of the cigarette industry and the real health risks - there was massive federal regulation of tobacco consumption and marketing starting in the 1970s, as well as the $200B+ Tobacco Master Settlement that came later.
There was enormous public action at the state and federal level against the tobacco industry.
EDIT: I dont' care about karma any more, but you downvoters suck. pg, mark my words that this Snowden/NSA crap will be the end of HN as a quality forum. It's unreadable lately. Every tin-foil hatter or teenage naif out there is using it as their personal forum in this pissing match of who can be more strident over something that any halfway intelligent person had assumed was happening already.
Are you joking? Do you know the cumulative cost of policing US roads, prosecuting offenders, and jailing the felonious vehicular offenders? I bet it's a lot more that 1% of the NSA budget.
Also, I'm going out on a limb and assuming you know no more than me about the probability of future terrorist threats, and the value of your opinion is equally negligible.
Almost none of the policing you mention is directed at reckless driving. The vast majority of highway policing is for excessive (but generally safe) speed, and much of the rest is enforcing bureaucratic nonsense (expired tags!). They get close with DUI enforcement, but non-drunken reckless driving goes basically ignored.
None of us can predict the future, but why would you assume terrorism wouldn't continue to be a negligible threat? Sure, it could suddenly become a leading cause of deaths in the USA, but so could kittens, in theory. If you want the government to continue to pour billions (arguably trillions if you count certain military actions on the ledger) into defending against terrorism, you'd better have an argument that goes beyond "nobody knows, but it could get bad!"
I think your metrics for concern about potential threats is a little skewed. You seem to be looking at "concern about a potential threat" has having a 1-dimensional score. Yes, there are more instances of death by hammer in the USA in a given year than there are terrorist attacks. But, the terrorist attacks have the potential for much larger impact (see links, below). Consider a 2-dimensional score for threat scenarios where we multiply likelihood of occurrence by potential impact for the following scenarios:
Scenario A:
Bludgeoned to death by a hammer.
Scenario B:
Terrorists recover a missing Cold-war era nuke, and detonate it over Iowa, during the winter. Effects are: nuclear explosion, EMP pulse disrupting power grid and electronics, disruption in home heating and food/medical supplies, downwind radioactive fallout over Chicago, Ohio, Pittsburgh, Philly, Boston, New York, Baltimore, DC, etc..
Scoring (pulling these numbers out of my arse for illustration purposes):
Scenario A: 6000 occurrences per year * 1.2 deaths per occurrence = 12000
Scenario B: 0.2 terrorist occurrences per year * (10 million fatalities + ((0.5 fatality / endangered) * 150 million endangered) = 17 million
As you can see, the terrorism is a lot more serious than hammers (or kittens). And, something like the NSA program could catch these potential large-impact events, because there are a lot of realistic and very scary scenarios:
P.S. Hello, NSA! I'm guessing this comment has gotten caught in some of your filters. I just want to say, keep up the good work. My brother-in-law works at Fort Mead, too.
And then, despite being clever enough to launch a nuclear attack, they're somehow stopped because they Skype'd each other "hey Bill, when are we launching that nuke?" That despite the financing and coordination behind a nuclear strike, they can't figure out any sort of way to communicate in a covert manner.
So, because you can't find fault with my main point that there are scary high-impact potential threats that the US government can and should try to protect us from, you are instead picking apart an imaginary scenario that I spent all of 30 seconds thinking up in order to illustrate my main point? Or, did I miss something?
No crap there are holes in Scenario B. Why don't you describe one that would be realistic since you seem to be good at looking at the details? I gave you all sorts of links about missing plagues and other bomb-making materials.
Or maybe the terrorist's just put up a sign at the launchpad that says "Acme Oil Drilling, Serving Des Moines since 1897!"
Regardless, Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution lists one of the duties of the federal government as "repel Invasions". An invasion occurs when someone or some group enters the land as an enemy and any activity to prevent or discontinue that situation would constitute repelling.
Additionally, Article IV Section 4 says "shall protect each of them [State in the Union] against Invasion".
I know the 4th Amendment talks about being secure in your papers and effects against searches, but this NSA surveillance (from what I've read) seems to be reasonable, warranted, and used in a limited manner (given that the real economy is still in a slump and new politicians get elected to existing posts).
Please try explaining to me again how the NSA looking for potential high-impact terrorist events is not a valid and important government function.
So, because you can't find fault with my main point that there are scary high-impact potential threats that the US government can and should try to protect us from, you are instead picking apart an imaginary scenario that I spent all of 30 seconds thinking up in order to illustrate my main point? Or, did I miss something?
I think you missed the point. He's essentially pointing out the fact that you spent all of 30 seconds thinking up a ridiculous scenario and then expected everyone to take it seriously as something that supports your argument.
An invasion occurs when someone or some group enters the land as an enemy and any activity to prevent or discontinue that situation would constitute repelling.
See, that's precisely the kind of thing that makes it hard to take you seriously. You're essentially redefining words "invade" [1] and "repel" [2].
this NSA surveillance (from what I've read) seems to be reasonable, warranted, and used in a limited manner
You're trying to argue that the NSA surveillance is "warranted" by redefining words "invade" and "repel". I don't think we need to go farther than a dictionary for a counter-argument.
What @mikeash disputed, though, was your attempt to argue that the surveillance is "reasonable" by coming up with that amusing little scenario.
Basically, you argued that the surveillance is reasonable because the magnitude of the outcome of the terrorist threat is serious enough to make the surveillance reasonable, because it's supposed to diminish the probability of the terrorist threat manifesting itself in an outcome like that.
Of course, one big problem is that you tried to support your argument with the aforementioned scenario and then blew up at @mikeash for criticizing you, as if the onus of coming up with the support for your argument was on him and not on you. Another big problem is in your assumption that mass-scale NSA surveillance of everyone in the USA and the world will really drive down the probability of a terrorist threat worst-case outcome, which is a subject of a heated debate, instead of being an assumption you can just take for granted.
The bigger problem is that line of reasoning doesn't allow for any restraint whatsoever: There was nothing in the argument that wouldn't apply to stationing a police officer in your home.
Second, I mean warranted as in "has a warrant". From wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)_ "U.S. government officials have disputed some aspects of the Guardian and Washington Post stories and have defended the program by asserting it cannot be used on domestic targets without a warrant, and that the program receives independent oversight from the executive, judicial, and legislative branches."
Third, I tried to let you people know that my scenarios were a bit factually incorrect by saying that I was "pulling the numbers out of my arse"! That some aspects of Scenario B were wrong beyond just the numbers shouldn't be surprising. Furthermore, where's the nitpicking about Scenario A then? I spent even less time thinking about it, so it should a little easier to pick apart.
I blew up at mikeash not because he was criticizing you, but because he is being blockheaded. As are you.
First, you have redefined both words. We could quibble semantic details ad nauseum, but since your written English is pretty good, I suspect your overall English is good enough that you know exactly what you're doing. Even if it wasn't, the "especially by an army" bit should have been a huge hint about the spirit of the word "invade".
Second, if you want to argue the legal points of whether the surveillance is warranted, you don't need to come up with vague, hand-wavy terrorist threat scenarios. You could just state your legal argument and let some expert out there destroy it ;)
Third, an excuse of "I know this is crap, but" is not a valid excuse. It's like saying to someone, "No offense, but you're a total idiot." Just because you said "no offense", it doesn't mean they shouldn't or can't take offense. Likewise, explicitly stating that you were "pulling the numbers out of your arse" doesn't make your scenario any less ridiculous or a better fit to support your argument in any way.
As for the nitpicking about scenario A, you're welcome to argue against it as much as you want. Again, the onus to do that is on you, so knock yourself out.
Fourth, @foobarqux hit the nail on the head with his comment about restraint. One thing is to argue that "repelling an invasion" is "warranted" by the government, another is to try to classify PRISM and other such surveillance programs as "repelling an invasion" and yet another is arguing about whether the extent of those programs is "warranted" or not. I don't know the Constitution by heart and to the letter, but I'm pretty sure that there's a lot of stuff in it that, taken to extremes, will contradict other stuff in it.
And fifth, if "being blockheaded" means not allowing bullshit arguments to pass as valid just because there's strong emotion behind them -- or because their author is throwing a temper tantrum -- then I hope my cranium gets as cubical as it can.
I bend no words. One of the experiences of colonialists was the Beaver Wars in which the Iroquois invaded and captured the territory of the Huron. The Iroquois would not constitute an army in the traditional sense because they were not uniformed and regimented - they were a force of irregulars, much like Al Qaeda is today. Suppose the Iroquois wanted to invade and recapture New York, that would be an invasion by a force other than an army that New York would need to repel.
And, do you spray insect REPELlent on yourself before you get bug bites or after? Protective measures also constitute repelling.
Also, I originally didn't want to argue the legality of the surveillance. I devised a hand-wavy scenario to illustrate my threat-assessment point.
Because, saying that kittens are as or more dangerous than terrorists IS blockheaded. If I'm wrong, I invite you to go down to your local SPCA and adopt a new pet terrorist.
If you don't want me picking holes in your "realistic" scenario, don't present it. I mean, seriously. Where do you get off in giving me an example of a supposed "realistic" scenario, then complaining when I point out its flaws? It's not my fault that your example was bad.
Not that I think this whole scenario is a credible threat, but I would say (barring an explosive anti-tamper mechanism): spend a weekend in a shed beating the shit out of it with a sledgehammer.
The core material is the important part, the rest you can reconstruct yourself.
(If there is an explosive anti-tamper mechanism, you might have some luck with those water-jet bomb disarmers.)
The core material is the important part if you are, say, Iran or North Korea. However, if you are in a cave with a box of scraps and no Tony Stark, there's a lot more to it.
Exactly how PALs work is not really well known. A lot of well-informed speculation can be found here:
The most plausible mechanism for how they work is lots of crypto, plus physical-level crypto-like mechanisms wherein detonation requires setting off the various explosives in the bomb at precise and different times, and those times are not stored in the bomb itself, but rather extracted from the PAL code.
It's possible to build simple nuclear weapons that don't require a lot of complicated steps to explode. But they're tremendously inefficient, and nobody bothers with them today. A stolen nuke will be an implosion design requiring a virtuoso performance of nanosecond-level timing to detonate properly, and those timings will not be easy to reverse engineer. Build a new weapon using the fissile material from the original bomb would likewise be a massive undertaking (only "easy" if you're Iran etc., not al Qaeda), and really would no longer qualify as a "stolen" weapon as proposed.
You think the PAL on one of the missing soviet "suitcase" nuclear devices[1] is that sophisticated?
They are booby-trapped against misuse though, so that's ok.
One such cache, identified by Vasili Mitrokhin, exploded when Swiss authorities tried to remove it from a wooded area near Bern.
I don't think civilians know enough about the current state of Soviet-era nuclear devices to be able to assess the risk very well.
Personally I'd be much more concerned about Al-Qaeda linked terrorists getting access to a Pakistani bomb. The Taliban successfully launched a raid on one of Pakistan's main naval bases[2], and NATO also admitted its concern over the Taliban's ability to target the Pakistan's nuclear installations.
Given that the Pakistan Navy noted Al-Qaeda members within its ranks it isn't difficult to imagine a scenario where they get access to the disarm-codes for any PAL-like on the bombs.
I'm not sure if this is an argument for or against domestic surveillance by the NSA, though!
Are you saying this cache near Bern blew up while containing nuclear weapons? Why haven't I heard of this before? Even with a non-nuclear explosion, such an event would make international news for a month.
Allegedly (ie, according to Wikipedia) the details are on pages 475 & 476 of a book called "The KGB in Europe" by former KGB officer Vasili Mitrokhin.
I don't know if that device was nuclear or not - I suspect not.
Edit: some details about other caches:
A former Soviet spy testified at a congressional hearing in Los Angeles on Monday that Russian intelligence operatives placed weapons and communications caches--perhaps even small nuclear devices--in California and other states as part of a plan to destabilize the United States through sabotage
> The core material is the important part if you are, say, Iran or North Korea. However, if you are in a cave with a box of scraps and no Tony Stark, there's a lot more to it.
Similarly, I suspect that PALs have traditionally been designed with the first in mind. They prevent a proper detonation as the bomb as it currently exists. They seem less concerned with someone using the bomb to cobble together a (relatively speaking) inefficient bomb, or even just a dirty bomb.
If you are satisfied with merely dozens to hundreds dead, and a massive clusterfuck of a disproportionate response, you may have to do nothing more than merely trigger the PAL's anti-tampering mechanism in a populated area. Worse case scenario there is that it doesn't work that way, then you just throw it into a truck with some fertilizer and blow it up anyway.
Nations are not interested in using a bomb like that, they would want the real deal in a form factor that is practical for military use. PALs seem designed to prevent that.
The possibility of taking an existing bomb and using it to build a new nuclear bomb without being an actual military is absurd. You'll not get an inefficient bomb, you'll get a dud.
Dirty bombs are a different threat altogether. One that's almost entirely psychological. No doubt effective at that, but a completely different scenario than the one being discussed.
Detecting terrorist nukes coming into the country is basically a side-effect of a sane defense policy against other nuclear states, and other nuclear states are quite a large threat.
You are confusing the result of the thing with the thing.
Terrorism is not a big problem because we work so hard to fight against it. You've confused that with not being a big problem in the first place. (It's like Y2K - it wasn't a big problem because we made such a big deal out of it and everything got fixed.)
And detecting a hidden nuke coming into the country is not the same thing as looking for nukes from other countries.
In one case you watch the country, in the other you watch your borders.
I'm not confusing anything. Please read what I'm saying rather than relying on your projection of what you think I think.
I'm well aware of the possibility that terrorism is rare because it's so heavily fought. I just don't see any reason to think that's actually the case.
Yes, terrorism could be like Y2K, in that it's a big problem that's averted through lots of hard work. It just doesn't look that way to me. Instead, it looks like a small problem that has tremendous resources devoted to it for no good reason.
Consider the following facts:
1. Terrorist attacks are pretty easy to carry out. Any motivated HNer could easily plan and execute an attack, on a programmer's salary, that would outshine the Boston bombings. (Something like 9/11 is obviously harder. But there's plenty of low-hanging fruit.)
2. Doing the above without getting caught is still pretty easy. There's essentially nothing in place to catch the "lone wolf".
3. Despite #1 and #2, terrorist attacks remain extremely rare.
The only conclusion I can draw from this is that there are very few people who are actually motivated to carry out attacks. It's nothing to do with enforcement, it's simply that most people don't actually want to go out and kill a bunch of innocents.
As for detecting nukes, why do you think that smuggling a warhead into the US is a technique reserved for terrorists? There's nothing that says Russia or China or North Korea couldn't do it. They probably won't, but it's enough of a threat to be worth guarding against.
You setup a strawman: "Small attacks are easy, and we don't (can't) defend against them, therefor no one wants to do small attacks."
Conclusion: Don't defend against large attacks.
But your strawman ignores that people do actually want to carry out large attacks, but they are harder to do, and get caught easier, so they happen less. That doesn't mean we should not defend against them.
(And obviously "most" people don't want to kill innocents. There are those that do however.)
> There's nothing that says Russia or China or North Korea couldn't do it. They probably won't, but it's enough of a threat to be worth guarding against.
Of course they "could". But why? It wouldn't gain them anything, so they won't bother. Like I said: For attacks by a country watch that country, not the border. i.e. look for the motivations.
(I suppose Iran might bother, if they could. But they'd probably do it by proxy, i.e. terrorist.)
I don't think that's what a "straw man" is. I didn't make up something that I claimed was your position and then attacked it.
My argument doesn't ignore these things, I simply disagree with you. I really wish we could have these discussions without people constantly telling me that I'm "ignoring" things when they find points they disagree with. I mean, I'm not an idiot. Obviously people want to carry out large attacks, as evidenced by the fact that they have.
However, the available evidence leads me to believe that people also want to carry out small attacks. The vast majority of terrorism worldwide is small attacks, and this is true no matter what the security situation in the region is. Most terrorism is individuals blowing themselves up on busses or similar, regardless of whether it's in a surveillance state or an anarchy or anything in between.
Thus, a relatively small number of small attacks implies a relatively smaller number of large attacks. The numbers are such that I don't see it being worth defending against at anything like the level we're currently doing.
As for nuclear smuggling by states, the obvious reason would be to use it as a first strike. Decapitate the enemy's command and control by detonating a warhead in their capital with no advance warning, then clean up the rest.
Yes, they probably don't want to carry out a first strike. But part of that lack of desire comes from our deterrence, and part of that deterrence comes from being able to carry out a retaliatory strike, and part of that comes from having advance warning of the initial strike.
>Terrorism is not a big problem because we work so hard to fight against it.
Citation needed. The government has yet to stop a single terrorist plot. The only ones they claim they've stopped are very clear entrapment cases that never would have amounted to anything without the government supplying the motivations and the supplies.
Every time a terrorist has actually tried an attack they've either succeed or screwed up all by themselves. The reason terrorism is not a big problem for the US is because terrorists nearly never attack the US.
> The government has yet to stop a single terrorist plot.
The world isn't an action movie where the hero stops the terrorist by cutting the wire on the bomb at the last minute.
An attack is stopped way way earlier in the process, where there is much less drama.
It gives a perverse incentive actually: Wait till the attack gets really big and obvious before stopping it, just so you can get some good press. I hope they never give in to this.
We have no evidence that even one plot has been stopped. The plots they show us that they have stopped are clear cases of entrapment. So why would you assume that some great work is going on behind the scenes given these two bits of evidence?
But it's amusing you bring up action movies since you clearly believe them. The reason we're not constantly getting attacked is because no one is attacking us.
Oh, you completely missed the numbers on the effects of conversion of the US of A into a police state. It was a good move on your part, since democracy and freedom are such an important part of American culture that the loss is not quantifiable.
It was Thomas Jefferson who said something along the lines of "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots". Americans are, today, scared so shitless by Bin Laden that they prefer surrendering freedom instead of committing some blood to the cause of freedom.
Pre 9/11 this NSA case would be a second Watergate. Today, it's yesterday's news. Bin Laden, for all intents and purposes, won.
I see your questionably attribute Jefferson quote and raise you a whole Constitutional Convention, which wrote in the US Constitution, Article IV Section 4, "[The federal goverment] shall protect each of them [State in the Union] against Invasion".
Speaking from Europe, you don't know invasion. Invasion is not a bomb in a marathon, and it isn't an attack on a skyscraper. You have never seen invasion, and realistically it's not a danger to the US.
Invasion is certainly not such a risk that widespread privacy invasion is warranted.
You are scared. You should also get some of the "brave" out of your lore and into reality.
Speaking from America, you sound like a pretentious stuffed shirt.
Through the miracle of broadcast media, like the printing press or YouTube, it is wholly unnecessary to experience an invasion to know that it is something worth repelling.
Besides, we American have experience with repelling invasions both large and small and from regular military and irregular forces, just not in recent years. Try searching on these topics: American Indian Wars, French and Indian War, War of 1812, Aroostook War, the Texas War of Independence, the Battle of Gettysburg, Sherman's March to the Sea, and the Aleutian Islands Campaign.
Lately, we Americans have been doing a good job of keeping the fighting over there instead of over here, and I imagine PRISM has been a big contributor to that success.
You imagine that without PRISM, we'd be fighting or at least have fought a war on American territory in recent years? Who would be the supposed aggressor?
The NSA couldn't even catch some college kids in Boston when the Russians phoned it in to Homeland Security 3 months earlier...
Also, if this is an effective mechanism like search warrants why couldn't it go through normal channels? Why do we need secret courts? If it's legit just tell the nation they're being wiretapped and we can have that discussion. Not being able to have a discussion publicly about how the government surveils us is contrary to the very essence of democracy.
If the people cannot consent then the governance is illegitimate according to the rule of law in the US. If wiretapping the nation is a good idea take it to the voters.
Detonating a nuke high enough to get widespread EMP damage is probably going to mean little or no fallout, especially with the kinds of devices that were used by both side later in the the Cold War (i.e. very efficient compact designs intended to allow as many RVs in a MIRV warhead as possible).
To really get a decent EMP, you need to detonate the weapon at an altitude of several hundred kilometers. Any fallout will just be added to the already massive amount of fission products in the atmosphere from previous detonations.
There is good money in traffic enforcement. So good that in Texas we had to make it against the law to finance your whole police department with speed-trap revenue.
The way to predict the future is look at the past. If we start at the first WTC bombing until today there are around 100 terrorism deaths per year. Utterly irrelevant.
You seem to imply we should trust the government to tell us the probability but they've never been right in the past and are completely opaque in their methods. There's literally no reason to believe them at all.
Okay, sure, let's toss out the comparison to smoking. How about deaths in motor vehicles on the US highways? Okay, not that either – there's been (arguably) a lot spent on that in the last 15 years. How about choking to death or babies dying from SIDS? A quick google shows that each claims about 2,500 lives a year in the US. So, over the last 15 years, that's approximately 37,500 lives lost to each, or 75,000 total over the last 15 years... I'll leave the terrorism death count to you. And, I guarantee you, the funding isn't anywhere near the anti-terrorism funding.
Like lupatus mentioned in the other response, there is considerable variability in the risk from terrorism. I would guess - while tragic, and my profound sympathies to anyone reading this who has been touched by either - that SIDS and infant/toddler choking deaths are much more consistent year over year (and there is a lot of educational material out there on preventing SIDS with sleep positions, and huge federal regulation on childrens' toys for, eg BuckyBalls).
I would instead use the analogy of weather in the context of urban planning around floodplains, building standards, etc. These are typically based on 50 or 100 year storm events. If you look at a 15 year average, these standards look like overkill.
EDIT: Lo and behold, another downvote. What in the way I've structured my argument or my logic is flawed? Or is it just more satisfying to downvote those you disagree with? Anyway, downvote away, you're only lowering yourself. I don't care.
The risk from terrorism is, most greatly, the fear of terrorism and the effort a society will expend on trying to stop future terrorism, which in itself generates fear and adds to the likelihood of spending more on preventing terrorism...
In short, it's all too easy to let it become a vicious cycle that simply is not justified based on the actual damage done by terrorism.
To circle back to your analogy to floods – I'm not sure about what you're suggesting. Are you saying we need to look at a larger timeframe? If so, I would point out that I was considering precisely the timeframe you suggested. But, beyond that, looking over the last 100 years, SIDS and choking have certainly killed more... and I would expect they'd continue to do so over the next 100, even if the current anti-terrorism measures were never enacted.
> Like lupatus mentioned in the other response, there is considerable variability in the risk from terrorism.
"Considerable variability" doesn't begin to cut it. Deaths from terror attacks follow a power law. That's why it doesn't make sense to compare them to fundamentally linear phenomena like traffic or smoking deaths. Coincidentally (or not), flood levels also follow a power law.
The thing about a power law phenomenon is that you can use it to justify an arbitrarily high prevention spend, because given the sample you have, you can guarantee an event lying outside it. Repeat ad infinitum.
How about lifetimes worth of wasted hours due to security theater? I would bet that those are substantially greater than the number of lifeyears lost to terrorist attacks.
Don't fret too much about the down votes. I once got voted down to something like -182 karma for giving supported arguments that a gay illegal immigrant journalist should be deported.
After that, pg stopped showing karma scores in the comments.
You're missing the first rule of any bureaucracy like the NSA, it has nothing to do with catching terrorists, but far more to do with perpetuating the bureaucracy and increasing it's budget. Catching anyone is a distant second.
I actually agree with this argument. I do believe terrorism shouldn't be ignored, but terrorism isn't about killing. it's about terror. we are terrified of terrorists and anything that resembles them. therefore: the terrorists have already won. when we give up our basic civil rights to protect ourselves from them, that's terror. I'm honestly more threatened by my government than terrorists. Terrorists have one thing they can do, kill. They know it will probably cause their death and the death of their citizens. The government can torture you, ruin your life in many ways, and still kill you, and there seems to be no repercussions. Look at the NSA guy that lied on live television under oath, and got caught on it two weeks later. where's the purjery? I fear MY government... that's messed up
I cringe at the idea of traveling nowadays because of all the drama at the security checkpoints. Taking off hoodie, shoes, keys, laptop.. Its painful enough to remember to put them on once, that I need to do it again at the airport with a long line behind me.
Just how many lives has terrorism claimed in the past decade?
It's easy to answer that question now. No one knew the answer to that a decade ago. No one knows how many lives terrorism will claim in the next decade. The government does have to plan for the worst case scenario.
Replace "terrorism" with "killer robots" or "sharks" or "bedbugs". Your statement remains as valid as ever, but somehow the government is only spending billions (or trillions) on one of them. Why?
The NSA does a lot more than just fight terrorism and of course the US invests a huge amount of money in mitigating the impact of other risks like natural disasters. They have to look at all these different threats and divvy up the money accordingly.
Sure, but there's a point where the government could go too far. For example, if the government starting having random mattress inspections inside peoples homes that would be way too intrusive despite any reductions in bedbugs that might result.
This is so intentionally obtuse that I'm not sure what to say. Let me know when bedbugs conspire with sharks to fly a plane into a building.
I think a great case can be made for the NSA and other agencies spending too much money "fighting terrorism," but there's no reason to hurt that argument with such an absurd stance.
"No one knows how many lives bedbugs will claim in the next decade. The government does have to plan for the worst case scenario."
The above is nuts, right? Yet both bedbugs and terrorists account for a negligible number of American deaths historically. So the above can't be nuts if the equivalent statement about terrorism is non-nuts.
Please explain where I'm wrong, and don't just say I'm "intentionally obtuse".
The United States has experienced large scale terrorist acts(9/11) and has stopped other terrorist plots since then. Terrorism has claimed significantly more lives than bedbugs, and has also cause tremendous damage to United States infrastructure. I'd also argue that comparing the deaths of folks involved in 9/11 to the deaths that have(n't) been experienced by bedbugs to be both absurd and disrespectful, but that's beside the point.
It's hard for me to believe that you're actually trying to make this argument.
To several significant figures, American deaths from both terrorism and bedbugs are 0% of total American deaths.
Tremendous damage to United States infrastructure? What are you talking about? Those buildings damaged and destroyed in downtown Manhattan? Yes, billions of dollars in damage, but way down in the noise in the economy overall. Congress causes more financial damage in a night of gridlock than that.
It's hard for you to believe? Well, believe it. I am making the argument. We react far too hard to terrorism, by several orders of magnitude. It's basically an allergic reaction. The story of terrorism and the US over the past decade and change is pretty much the story of a bee and a person with a bee allergy. Essentially all of the damage is done by the massive overreaction to the sting, not the by the bee. The difference is that we can, at least in theory, simply choose to stop being allergic. The problem won't be solved by overreacting even more.
>and has stopped other terrorist plots since then.
No it hasn't, not a single one. Every single case they've "stopped" was simple entrapment of mentally unstable people. If they'd left those people alone nothing would have ever happened.
> The government does have to plan for the worst case scenario.
No more so than the government needs to consider all other scenarios, and the costs of any policy choice in those scenarios, and use the likelihood along with the potential costs and benefits of each scenario in assessing the desirability of the policy.
Otherwise, planning for the worst case scenario just becomes a convenient excuse for policies that make life considerably worse for everyone in the most likely scenario.
That doesn't make much sense. What's the objective? If it IS saving lives, then a lot less money than the NSA burns up can be spent saving a lot more drug addicts, cancer sufferers, typhoid, HIV, and so on - there are millions more deaths than those caused by terrorism - no matter how unquantifiable those are.
Deaths from terror attacks follow a power law distribution. There is literally no such thing as a worst-case scenario. For any "justifiable" spend or effort on preventing attacks, you can guarantee that there will be an attack coming along which will justify spending more.
The comparison to automobiles is interesting because this is another example where we do sacrifice freedoms to enhance safety. At the state level we have licenses, registrations, speed limits, mandatory seat belt laws, insurance mandates, etc. At the federal level we have safety standards. Not sure it's terribly relevant just an interesting parallel.
It's especially interesting because a lot of automobile safety revolves around mitigating damage once an incident occurs, and there's a fairly concrete number (IIRC around $3 million) for how much money it's worth spending to save one additional life. Neither one would be considered even remotely acceptable in counterterrorism.
It's not about the number of lives but it is about the state of fear that grips the state afterwards. That anything can happen and government has no power to stop that.
I spent a decade in South Africa where the ANC bombed the shit out of it, and there was concern, not terror. No one I encountered was afraid, let alone terrified. Each death was a tragedy, but like the IRA terror bombings in London, people just carry on with their lives.
This is the funniest thing about the US. Some places experience actual terrorism and they don't let it control their lives. The US has one successful attack of 3k people (to be fair, that's pretty big for a terrorist attack) one time and go literally insane.
Imagine what the world would be like today if the US government had somehow managed to take this approach in 2001. (I say "somehow" because even if Bush and everyone around him wanted to do it this way, people were calling for blood.)
Here's what I see:
1. Al Qaeda remains a global nuisance but ignorable.
2. The governments of Iraq and Afghanistan remain more or less like they were. The population of those countries is probably differently off than they are in reality, but not necessarily better or worse.
3. The US federal debt is several trillion dollars lower.
4. The US economy is doing better.
5. No PATRIOT act, nobody rotting away in Guantanamo, somewhat less ubiquitous surveillance.
All in all, sounds like a big win. Do you disagree?
It took me a while to parse your sentence, and to figure out who the "they" was referring to. In turns out that in English and in many Middle Eastern languages, "Afghani" is the singular form of the demonym of Afghanistan. This mirrors the singular demonym of many other Middle Eastern countries (e.g., "an Israeli, "Yemeni", "Iraqi"). So "the Afghani" refers to a single person from Afghanistan. It took me a second reading to figure out that you meant the people of Afghanistan, in plural.
The commonly accepted plural form in English is "Afghans" [1].
Eisenhower certainly didn't think so, and he lived through the main example people bring up to support it:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
That implies that the people who push and pay for guns and rockets would ever allocate that money to food or clothes, if it wasn't spent for the former.
As far as resourcing goes food and clothing is as easy a problem to solve as the U.S. will ever encounter; it is the will to solve it that is necessary.
If it was happening every day it might be worth considering. But a one-off of 10k wouldn't be worth my time either. The proper response to 9/11 was what Norway showed us: "this is terrible and we're going to grieve but we're not going to change anything".
especially since we don't know how much deeper the programs go. Still, they are the largely the result of people trying to defend the country from terrorism
So you don't know how deep it goes, but already decided what you would find at the other end of it if you did. Okay?
Regardless of the cynicism you bring to the topic, the primary goal of these programs is to save lives.
Regardless of the optimism you bring to the topic, a lot of the same people who are for these programs, are also for wars that get a whole lot of people killed for nothing but dominance. So, hmmm.
Oh, and did it ever occur to you that for some people learning about the world comes first, then cynicism about certain issues second, not the other way around as is often so conveniently implied?
I'm certainly not saying that the programs are right or benevolent.
That is exactly what you just did -- "the primary goal of these programs is to save lives".
I'm afraid you've misunderstood on several levels. My language was careful, your reading was not.
First, my post gives no judgement on Prism or other program positive or negative. I have not "decided what [I will] find at the other end..." I am critical of the programs, but I choose not to take the easy way out by demonizing the NSA or portraying these programs as an Orwellian nightmare.
Second, I point out the "primary" goal is to save lives, but I make no mention of additional goals or side effects. These goals and side effects are part of the larger discussion that can only be productive when we take a deep breath and set aside our preconceived notions of the programs. This is as difficult to me as it is to anyone. My initial reaction to the news of these programs was visceral. I was angry and frustrated. Now my frustration has been rechanneled to the sadly fruitless discussion. In short, there are effects outside the primary goal (of saving lives) that are bad and should be criticized. If you can criticize the bad without losing sight of the good, you can find progress.
I won't respond to what is "often so conveniently implied" since I never implied any such thing.
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but I choose not to take the easy way out by demonizing the NSA or portraying these programs as an Orwellian nightmare.
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Fair enough, but then why take the easy way out of the discussion, and instead of addressing individual posts guilty of the above in your opinion directly, but just fire that salvo into the room? Okay, you're free to do that, to summarize and save yourself time, but at least know that I read a lot of ("you're all wrong because of strawman strawman") in the last weeks on HN, and reacted more polemic to your post than maybe was called for. Apologies for that.
But still, I disagree. "Orwellian" to me is about language and the resulting inability to reason, not telescreens and 5 minutes of hate.
We live on a planet were Saddam was attacked in the windfall of 9/11, while huge chunk of the American people believed he had something to do with it. It's not like administration said "hey, we need this war, but we don't want you to support it for false reasons, Saddam was NOT involved in 9/11, he's just this super epic dictator and weapons wiz". That would still have been bullshit deserving of a hanging "if the Nuremberg laws were applied", but it would have been a nice gesture.
But no. They used it passively. Result of the whole exercise, so far that is? More dead people than the whole history of terrorism against the US several times over. While talking about democracy, posing on an aircraft carrier, all that stuff.
Not that I can blame the NSA for that, I don't. But there is no Orwellian institution in an otherwise sane society, it's all connected. The NSA is just one aspect of it, not even a very interesting one IMHO. But hey, you do recall "Total Information Awareness", and how they scrambled to change the name when they realized they were too honest, right? So the NSA certainly does Orwellian in-house, too. But even when they don't, they are a tool in the toolbox of an Orwellian state. The only way to deny that would be to say they are actually independant of it, which would be a problem also. So there you go..
Even when I say NSA, I don't mean to exclude anyone else. In Germany the Verfassungsschutz (literally "constitution protection") is basically the sole reason the NPD (neonazi party) can't be dealt with, because it and the neonazi scene is so filled with undercover operatives. That got so bad that the cops in Sachsen-Anhalt, to be able to raid them without forewarning, decided to not inform the Verfassungsschutz anymore ( German, but at least it's source: http://www.taz.de/!103340/ ). I don't know if it's strictly Orwellian, but it's fucking crazy, and fucking evil. Well-meant, banal evil; the kind that actually really matters, the big killer. Suicide bombers and killing sprees are horrible, flying planes into a building I still haven't fully wrapped my head around -- but all that still vanishes compared to the killings committed in total by perfectly calm, perfectly well-meaning people, operating strictly within the law.
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Second, I point out the "primary" goal is to save lives,
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Which in turn implies benevolence. Instead of how centers of power act, in self-interest. How many people are killed by international terrorism -- I mean the kind the NSA idly watches because it's the US doing it? And how many such deaths does the NSA credibly avert? Finally, how many people could be clothed, fed and sheltered by 1% the budget of the NSA? I mean, if saving lifes is really the "primary" (why in quotes?) goal, why not at least A/B test a little?
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If you can criticize the bad without losing sight of the good, you can find progress.
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Yes, but I also find backlashes to progress. Consider the 60s and the backlash to that. I see that were people were robbed and killed in the past, they're now simply left behind in the ever faster growing gap between the super rich and the rest. I see much energy with those who fear and are greedy, and much aimlessness or premature celebration of those who love. I see the threshold for how many people you need to fool or blackmail or have on your side for complete, endless control sink rapidly as technology progresses, too.
But still, I didn't loose sight of the good. I make sure to look at clouds and smile at dogs every day. I've met nice cops, I've seen brutal ones, I know bureaucrats who are just a little slow, but friendly, and those who harbour resentment towards anyone not as bald or fat as they. And especially that I would say quite a bunch of those, and soldiers too, have... serious issues... makes me feel for those who are their fellows who are decent people.
So I wouldn't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and even if none of my post is about "the good stuff", and disagrees with you on many points, you can believe me that I hear you on this, and agree. Sometimes I say it myself, but sometimes I don't think it's helpful. Imagine there is a burning house, we need help putting out the fire, and some guy says "but consider all those houses that are NOT burning". Even if it's well meant it can be irritating.
I don't believe in collective punishment or blame, but I DO believe in those who are not meant getting out of the way instead of shielding those I'm trying to get at, or are being used by third parties as a shield even. I mean, if they can live with collateral damage meaning people being murdered utterly dead, they can live with me mistakenly considering someone a mediocre cog in a crappy machine, one would think.
Not even anyone I consider a "perpetrator" I really wish evil on, I don't care for punishment as much as about self-defense. But you can't forgive the attacker until you stopped the attack, because that would be just bending over. So ideally, quite a bunch of people really ought to be lead right up to the guillotine and then forgiven. I see no other way that is not a farce and pissing on graves.
But when it comes to "just" words: human history might go on for a looong time, and anyone who could take offense, no matter how bad they feel about it, will be long dead when the principles of power and rationalization will still be the same. Just read the old testament, this stuff is old as dirt. As long as there is recorded history, the world has been Orwellian as far as I can tell. I'm not so naive to think I will see the end of it, but I'll throw my weight into the scale regardless. I'm calling it, and screw anyone who doesn't like it because it applies to their little parcel of the world as well.
I'm sorry if my post is so long and incoherent, and also if it seems unfriendly or is full of typos, but I've been awake for a full 29 hours, and I'm beginning to feel it. Maybe I should have posted tomorrow but here goes. Don't take it to personally where I do you wrong, I don't know you.
First, my post gives no judgement on Prism or other program positive or negative.
Yes, it does. You said, "...the surveillance programs are not evil either." Also, you said "...the primary goal of these programs is to save lives." - which does indicate a judgement since "saving lives" is empirically a good thing...even though you really don't know the true purpose, only what you've been told.
Second, I point out the "primary" goal is to save lives, but I make no mention of additional goals or side effects
You don't know that. You have been told that, but you don't know it.
...what is "often so conveniently implied" since I never implied any such thing.
Yes, you did. You said (apparently speaking to the entire forum) that, "Regardless of the cynicism you bring to the topic, the primary goal of these programs is to save lives." - as if that nugget of "knowledge" about the alleged purpose of those programs should override any cynicism...implying that the general cynicism here is not already grounded in knowledge.
Actions speak louder than words. That's why nobody believes these pigs. It's not like they all woke up one day and said, "I should be cynical about this government thing."
>While Snowden isn't a monster, the surveillance programs are not evil either.
"Evil" is a BS religious term.
It obscures political issues.
Those programs are: far-reaching, constitution breaking, targeted as dissidents, useless for real terrorists, and, in a word unacceptable in a proper democracy.
Nobody cares if they those doing it are "evil" or not.
I also take offence with "Regardless of the cynicism you bring to the topic, the primary goal of these programs is to save lives.".
Surveillance programs have been with us long before terrorism -- they have been traditionally been deployed, along with secret services, state police, etc, against dissident citizens -- and they have a long history in the US and in all Western countries (and, it goes without saying, in all third world dictatorships).
So that their "primary goal is to save lives" needs a ton of citations. Why? Because some politicians say so? They might even believe it -- though politicians are seldom as naive, except while they are not in office. That doesn't make it true.
Any huge bureaucracy such as a government, that supports trillions of dollars in private interests, finds a way to perpetuate itself and squash those that want change to the status quo and "make waves". People don't have to be "evil" -- they just have to do their work and show some zeal. Real "evil" is banal and ordinary, not like in the movies.
According to many frequent HN readers, the government is completely out of the control. Neither of these claims is true, but they are difficult to get past.
This is simply an opinion. Over these past few weeks I have had cycles of getting angry, then pensive, and then taking a break from thinking about these issues for a while. I have just woken up, and I am feeling calm and peaceful right now. Yet, I still feel extremely strongly that these programs are immensely out of control and offensive to the ideals this country supposedly stands for, regardless of any "noble" intentions behind them.
I agree. In fact, I wish that HN users wouldn't post links to Vice at all. The quality of research and reporting is generally poor, and the tone is sensational.
Plus, the reporters' motives are questionable because Vice is a strange hybrid between a news outlet and an ad agency. Its executives have publicly acknowledge this. [1]
Whenever I point this out, someone always says, "Well, yeah, but all news is messed up." As a former investigative journalist, I find this to be a stupid argument. Americans have an incredible number of news sources to choose from. There are plenty of independent outlets with greater journalistic integrity; those who feel that all news is on par with Vice need to realize their options.
"Still, they are the largely the result of people trying to defend the country from terrorism.".
Hahaha. You made a funny.
On a serious note, do you have anything to back that statement up besides your own opinion?
The primary goal of these programs and of the government is to control a population. If they die its not so much too control, but rest assured these agencies have no qualm of taking or ruining a life or 100 000 lives to further their own interests.
I think you're mostly on the point, but unless you have serious inside knowledge, I don't know if you can really assume PRISM is about national security and not about other nefarious purposes.
"According to the government, Snowden is a traitor. According to many frequent HN readers, the government is completely out of the control. Neither of these claims is true..."
Ummm, I'm not sure if you are an American, or not, but those of us who believe in the US Constitution, as well as its Bill of Rights, know that the words contained therein are the only thing stopping our government from becoming another East Germany/North Korea style police state.
The 4th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America plainly lays out the right of the people to be secure in their persons, papers, and effects (the communications media of the era,) and it also spells out the requirements which the government must meet in order to breach that right to privacy. The current domestic surveillance program fails to meet these requirements on many levels.
Perhaps you don't find the abrogation of our Bill of Rights to be evidence of a government gone "completely out of the control." but a vast number of "We the People" are outraged at a great many of the acts being done in our name, without our consent.
The terrorism excuse is flimsy at best, especially in light of the fact that exponentially fewer Americans are harmed by terrorist acts than are killed by drunk driving on an annual basis.
Prescription drugs kill more Americans each year than all of the terrorist acts in the last 10 years combined.
It seems that those who would choose to marginalize the fact that our government has overstepped its mandate would rather shun the intent of the very Bill of Rights which made America the beacon of freedom and liberty for all.
History has a way of repeating itself, and those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.
This "silly little game" is neither silly, nor little, this issue deals with an attack upon our Bill of Rights, which so many have fought and died for.
You've quoted me egregiously out of context. "silly little game" (not even verbatim) came from this sentence:
>I'm saying that this is important and meaningful and needs to be treated as such rather than another opportunity to win points in some silly political game.
You left out the "important and meaningful" part and the "treated as such" part. What I refer to as a silly game is the attempt to wrack up points for one side or the other rather than taking the debate seriously and analyzing it in a sober manner.
As I've said before. I'm very critical of these programs. But rather than contorting my mind through anger into assuming the NSA is the Third Reich, I try to take a step back.
To your point on the 4th Amendment. I agree that there is probably a violation there. I hope that there will come a time when the conversation about these programs is honest and sober enough to analyze these programs with the appropriate care.
Like several others, you've mistaken my reluctance to jump on your angry bandwagon as opposition. Far from it. At a gut level, I agree with most everything you've said here. Still, it's harmful to the public debate because it is hasty and hyperbolic.
My apologies for taking words out of context (I swear you must have edited) but this imagined attempt of mine to allegedly "wrack up points" is actually an attempt on my part to not let this issue die while the heart of the matter remains.
There is no question that the wholesale eavesdropping by the government and its agents upon innocent Americans is an "egregious" violation of the 4th Amendment.
Spying on Americans was no good when Hoover did it, it was no good when Nixon did it, and it is still no good today.
To add insult to injury our non-elected bureaucrats have repeatedly lied to us regarding the spying because they know that what they are doing is wrong.
I cannot sit idly by when my nation has delved into being a police state worthy of the term "Orwellian."
There is nothing "hasty and hyperbolic" about calling a spade a spade.
How in the world is the government not "completely out of control"? At this point basic decisions that violate the constitution are made almost daily. Hell, today we decided that the right to vote wasn't important the week after the government confirmed it is unconstitutionally spying on its citizens. What would you need for out of control? Them to be randomly shooting citizens? The idea that we should accept unconstitutional surveillance because the government's stated reason is that this "saves lives" (it doesn't) is just absolutely shocking and quite frankly, seems quite stupid.
they actually doing it already. There are only a couple of minor details for now, like it is off American soil and supposedly only for ones whom government designated as terrorists. Though i don't see how public would seriously object to shooting terrorists on American soil as well, and with government having complete unchecked power over terrorist designation ... Already, people protesting animal farms are terrorists according to the current laws like AETA in MA.
> While Snowden isn't a monster, the surveillance programs are not evil either.
I am tired of exceptionalism being thrown around. Had this been Pol Pot or Stalin few would be saying "oh they just tried to build a better society there were not evil, they purged the enemies of the people that would have prevented the utopia to take hold".
Even the most depraved dictators and butches had justifications for their crimes and reasons why they were not evil. And most importantly they had supporters that were brainwashed enough to keep defending it.
So here we also argue, of course our countrymen, elected officials, and heads of department and CEOs of large military industrial conglomerates are not "evil" they just want to save us from the terrorism. Because we are _special_. We are inherently good (unlike those other inherently _evil_ countries). We are a "city on a hill" a "shining example" etc etc. This is not a systemic problem just a small faux pas...
Just because there may not be one single person to blame for everything doesn't mean evil isn't happening. Just because it is spread and washed over in a big sea of bureaucracy were every cog does one small task (and compartmentalization in the intelligence apparatus amplifies this), doesn't mean that things are just a little out of hand. They are way out of hand.
> Still, they are the largely the result of people trying to defend the country from terrorism.
I can't think of too many instances of what we know consider evil regimes that didn't justify their actions in exactly the same way "we are just trying to defend our country from terror of <insert bogeyman here>".
> Accept that, take a breath, then reevaluate your grievances. ... I'm certainly not saying that the programs are right or benevolent.
So what are you saying? I don't understand. What I am saying is that these programs are evil. This has been going on for too long. There is too much invasion of privacy. There is too much corruption. Too much lobbying and spending on wars and military. Now is the time to get angry. Now is the time to protest.
A few whistle blowers came before Snowden. Everyone had time to take breaths while they were ignored. Ok, ignore this one. Slide further downhill.
Yes, it is easy to defend you side because, that is politics. The majority defend their interest. and if there's enough segmentation, there may even be a close to fair compromise.
Only problem now is that it's not about majority, but accumulated power. Those policies were never to defend the country (and by believing that you make me question my judgment to even start to argue with you). They are there for specific interests.
A semi-smart terrorist could get in a Battlefield 3 server and talk about blowing stuff up with his terror buddies and no one would think anything of it. Context is Key, do you think the NSA monitors all game servers worldwide? No? hmm.. Well then who are they really trying to spy on?
> It's depressing that this article is so high on HN right now
Not to pick an ad hominem - but if you've only been a HN member fro 4 days, it seems strange you'd be "depressed" that a certain story grabs the various members of this forum's interest.
> Still, they are the largely the result of people trying to defend the country from terrorism.
By reading everyone in the world's mail? No way. I don't believe that. It's an attempt at classifying people by their social impact and political orientation in order to manipulate them in elections and send police to harass the political enemies of whoever uses the database.
It's a grab for power. Information is power. They don't care about terrorism. It's not terrorism. It's more probable to die shot by a policeman than a terrorist. It's easier to die slipping in the bathroom, for pete's sake!
Thank you for posting this. I haven't been here all that long, and it has (honestly) been scaring me how extreme and often simplistic the political views of the intelligent and relatively (or quite) powerful people here seem to be.
What scares me is how far the US has fallen, how little regard the have for privacy and even human rights (e.g. Gitmo, Pakistan, etc.) but people like you still take offense that someone might imagine that the government might be out of control. Of course they're fucking out of control, get your head out of your goddamn ass.
Even with the panic that has happened regarding the revelations of mass-surveillance I don't think the public at large truly realizes how screwed up this situation is.
The common defense of sweeping surveillance is that it serves an important purpose, finding terrorists, and it has succeeded in that purpose.
Ignoring the very serious problems with framing the debate in such a way it's also fundamentally misleading. There have been many cases of "terrorist plots" within the US having been foiled over the last few years, but many if not most of these are not as serious as most would believe. A stereotypical "foiled terrorist plot" begins with a radicalized individual who somehow comes to the attention of the authorities. Then the FBI spins up an elaborate sting to essentially entrap the radicalized individual into committing to some sort of attack, often providing fake bombs in the process. And just before they go through with their planned "attack" the FBI arrests them.
Meanwhile, the FBI, NSA, TSA, et al have failed to foil many much more serious attacks, such as the Boston bombings, the Fort Hood shooting, the "underwear bomber", the failed 2010 Times Square bombing attempt, etc.
It's not a very good article. Google his name and you can find the FBI affidavit and more information; it's a textbook "entrapment" case as the OP described.
Basically Ferdaus made statements that he supported terrorism and had some vague idea of an attack using RC airplanes, FBI agents posing as terrorists got in touch with him and coaxed him into more than just words. They gave him money which he used to buy guns, explosives, and model planes. Without FBI assistance his "plans" would likely never have gone anywhere.
This sort of "entrapment" is legal in the US? But maybe they wouldn't care. Anyway, wouldn't it be more useful to invest the time, money and energy in facilitating social integration of these individuals. Just asking.
First off, the vast majority of folks snatched up in these stings end up pleading guilty. It's simple logic, a certainty of spending 20 years in prison is vastly better than the chance of serving a life sentence or being executed.
However, from the strictest legal perspective it's questionable how much the entrapment defense could be used in these cases. From a practical perspective much of this is clearcut entrapment. However, from a legal perspective you have folks who very clearly make strong statements saying they are willing to commit acts of terror and then when presented with the opportunity (in an elaborate masquerade put on by federal agents) they follow through. I can't imagine many lawyers salivating at the prospect of defending that.
No, it's very much illegal in the US. But the government has to show results for all this irrational fear they've inspired so they're not above breaking their own laws and imprisoning mentally unstable people to accomplish their goals.
Actually, they used to. Then they wised up and started using couriers. Both worked to the disadvantage of Al Quaida. When they stopped using electronic communications their organization suffered. Then, it was the movements of a courier that gave away Bin Laden.
So, regardless of whether you think it's OK for the NSA to spy on everyone, this push did break down Al Quaida's organization.
Whether it affects cell oriented terrorism (or 'lone wolf' terrorism) is another matter. For example, for the Boston bombers one of them did mention something about terrorism and came on the radar, but the FBI misjudged the threat.
To prevent further attacks. The situation re: radicalization has not changed, and will not change until the economic and social situation in Arab countries improves and/or Saudi influence changes/decreases.
Radical Islam is still around, as you can see by their infiltration of various populist movements in the Arab countries.
Monitoring of social media (as someone mentioned elsewhere here) is probably a very cost effective way of keeping tabs of the flow of money and influence of radical groups.
Except that terrorist attacks on the US were rare before this program, before its predecessors, and before the Internet. "Radical Islam" is not a specific threat by any stretch of the imagination. Most Islamic terrorists are fighting in the Middle East, not in America.
Further, this program is not focused on Islamic groups. It is broad, wholesale surveillance. Everyone is being monitored.
Sorry, but the "we are doing this to keep you safe" line is getting pretty old.
Re: Terrorism. Yes, most of the death count is at the homes of terrorism (which perversely gives the greatest hope that it will stop). However, radical Islamic terrorism is exported all over the world.
Re: Why have espionage agencies, and what should be their scope. Yes, this is a good debate but along the lines of "How big should our military be?" I believe the answer is very complex. As a citizen of a country I would hope my country has a military and an intelligence agency. I would hope both are independent of political influence, yet are under the leash of civilian government.
What should the scope of a spy agency be? By the very nature of the business it needs to be secret from the general public (i.e. other nations). Countries have spied on each other through out history because you really want to know what the other fellow is up to, especially if you can do something about it.
Snowden's statements re: spying on China/Russia whatever are not surprising. If you are a US citizen I would hope that you hope your intelligence agencies are keeping an eye on China/Russia, just as a Chinese citizen you would hope the Chinese government is trying to get information about the US.
It's a delicate game that all countries play to varying degrees of success.
Where Snowden has crossed the line is that he was working for the government and then decided to embarrass it re: other countries.
If Snowden had said, look China spies on the US, Russia spies on China, and the US spies on both. I think this is illegal, he would have been an interesting person to follow though a little naive.
From what he has done, I would think, there is a pretty high chance he is on some payroll, probably Chinese. Again, as others have mentioned, his timing and his statements are not that of a person trying to correct a wrong. It really sounds like some one who's a pawn in a diplomatic game.
When you have a government throwing billions of dollars into locating you, how exactly are you supposed to hide? Especially since Osama's courrier was only discovered because he was sold out (or tortured out) by his associates. In security you can only be as strong as your weakest link, and when dealing with a global organization you will surely have weak links.
> In security you can only be as strong as your weakest link, and when dealing with a global organization you will surely have weak links.
This is the point that this, bandwagon, article misses completely. They may be judging right, the smart criminals (or terrorists) understand tradecraft and how to avoid using obvious means of detection. However there are always many more low level folks that wil slip up due to lack of competence and lack of experience. When this happens we (non-terrorists) are able to establish a foothold at some, any, level of the organization and start to pick it apart.
Article seems to kind of miss the point. While the NSA's STATED reasons for these programs is to "fight terror" that doesn't necessarily mean it is their actual reason. If they want to spy on activists and everyday citizens this seems like a pretty solid strategy.
According to another whistleblower, it also means people who control budgets and power
"...including senior Congressional leaders, the former White House Press Secretary, high-ranking military generals, the entire Supreme Court, and even then-Senator from Illinois and future President, Barack Obama."
One man's "activist" is another man's terrorist, basically. Activists are liable to convert to extremism with the right set of triggers. This can therefore qualify as "counterterrorism", because if they access all your communications they may be able to flag you as a potential clinic bomber, etc.
Also, I seriously doubt the assertion in the headline that terrorists simply don't use common online services, and even if this were true, the ripples that can be correlated from their associates who do use these services would still be of interest to law enforcement.
Depends on your end goal. If the goal is actually what's stated, I.e. stopping terrorists, there is no value.
If the actual goal is to produce a massive database of citizen activities for later (ab)use, then there is a huge benefit for the government.
Since all of the evidence seems to point to scenario #2 (since there is no good reason that tracking those eeeevul turrists) requires all this information from innocent people, I think we can safely assume their excuse is a shitty facade.
There seems to be two NSAs in the media right now: the extremely competent one that can access your email from a desktop without any oversight or trouble and the bumbling idiots who don't know more about terrorists than reporters.
Having worked in several large (public and private) organizations, I always find it amusing when people act like it is somehow inconceivable that an organization could demonstrate both extreme competence in one set of activities and extreme incompetence in a another set of activities whose domains overlap those addressed by the first set.
>The Peter Principle is a proposition that states that the members of an organization where promotion is based on achievement, success and merit will eventually be promoted beyond their level of ability.
It meshes perfectly with every iffy organisation in history.
They present themselves as harmless and benign, offering re-assurance and smiles, while being from questionable to insanely violent with some unpleasant agenda behind those smiles. Initially deal with a mafia, and it all smiles and pasta. Behind the scenes, its a different story.
So yeah, the NSA and he government are trying to present a Church of England tea and cakes at the afternoon garden party type of image. Of course they are. Meanwhile the people questioning this setup are trying to present an image people need to be worried about. The media then just present these extremes, and the citizens are expected to pick a side. As both sides become increasingly extreme, the issues loses credibility and gets swept aside by the next big news splash. while the relatively few people who actually care eventually disperse wonder what the hell just happened. This is the exact same pattern we see on almost every issue. Where is Occupy now?
This issue's only real relevance is as another example of the broken bond between those who govern and the people. And Im not sure there ever was any such bond. Lets face is, the government is basically the formalization of the rule and maintenance of the powerful over the population. There was a balance, they did used to realism they had to keep us broadly happy, in order to keep their power in place. But I think now, they are so arrogantly confident in their manipulations that they no longer care.
Heh, its like the old saying: No matter who you vote for, the government always get in.
> They present themselves as harmless and benign, offering re-assurance and smiles
But they haven't... They've made it clear that they are a potent force that fights the evil terrorists. No part of the NSA response has been smiles and cakes. They're calling for Snowden's blood and telling America that this is serious stuff.
I've heard this argument several times and I disagree with it.
Organizations are basically groups of people; it's entirely possible that some people in an organization are more competent than others. There could be extreme differences in the level of competency. Or maybe some people are competent in some areas (e.g. the technical details of surveillance) but lack competence in other areas (e.g. common sense). This could be even the case amongst the key decision-makers of an organization.
I've always found that when large organizations start a large project or begin a radical shift (like pre- to post-9/11 NSA's surveillance program), the goal is every bit as competent and well thought out as any could be, but the implementation is always rushed and rickety.
That's probably what we have here. A very sophisticated surveillance program that siphons data from all the major networks, that also misses 99% of the communications it was designed to catch because that last 20% of implementation isn't worth the expenditure.
Has it occurred to you that the NSA's competence in signals intelligence might be used for industrial espionage, with counterterrorist surveillance being a convenient cover story?
There was a time when the CIA was intimately involved with drug traffickers as part of the Contra program. It didn't go to the top and it wasn't deliberate CIA policy, it was just a matter of the CIA building tremendous infrastructure to supply the Contras that led to airfields and weapons ending up being used by the same CIA-supported individuals for drug trafficking. They ended up producing a massive cocaine import industry.
With this level of spying infrastructure and the poor oversight of agents and admins within the NSA, corrupt usage of this technology is effectively inevitable.
I've been noticing this for a long time. Any facet of government is described in this extremely inconsistent way. Think about it, the idiots that can't be trusted to do anything right are the ones in charge of the jack-booted thugs who will ruthlessly come exterminate your family for (abortion|gun ownership|bad religion|scare topic of the second). We can't trust the government to hand out lollipops to children because they will enact UnAmerican(tm) enforcement of socialist conditions on the recipients with an iron fist, that money is better spent on law enforcement and our military heros (you know, the afore-mentioned jack-booted thugs).
Somehow the organizations that align with one's ideologies are painted as efficient do-gooders in a horribly inefficient and bumbling system, while the ones that align with opposing ideologies are capable only of a incompetence at a level usually reserved for high comedy.
I think ultimately it comes from this notion of "the" government. It is easier/lazier to assume that government is a monolithic entity rather than a large organization of people, therefore complex and not at all monolithic. Since people are used to this sort of treatment, it becomes a nice dramatic vehicle for people to tell stories and push agendas, and it is so ingrained, people rarely say "hey wait a minute..."
Just for fun, pay attention and call people out on it sometime. The anti-jackbooted thugs rants and law enforcement needs more money (from the same person) crowd is pretty common in tech - note the switches in perceived competence, and position, and call people out. The mental gymnastics of retaining the position are awesome. Seriously, if there was an olympics of cognitive dissonance, people who like US politics would win the gold every damn time.
I can relate to the phenomenon you describe (people who can't, for example, decide if they are Libertarian or not). But some populations have worked out a complete, internally consistent alternate reality. Talk radio and Glenn Beck, for example, do not contradict themselves very much.
The jack-booted thugs are "the government", the ones being ordered around by Godless Communist Obama; they are taking away our guns while intentionally giving guns to Mexican gangsters and black panthers, using the IRS, preparing the Peace Corps as a Marxist militia and sending drones to kill Americans just for opposing him. No incompetence, just pure and concentrated tyranny and malice intentionally resulting in the apocalypse, because Obama and his supporters literally hate America and are literally violating the rights of Real Americans and literally preparing to exterminate them.
The ones who should get funded are types who will support us, particularly right-wing groups like Oath Keepers and militias, who won't comply with the Obama agenda and will help us defend ourselves from Obama's tyranny and restore the glory of America as a Christian state, as the founders intended. This isn't "the government," but rather "the people."
Obama and his supporters are winning right now by treachery (a brainy kind of competence) and support from archvillain "elites" like George Soros and almost every college professor, but in the long term they are corrupt and weak; the strength and purity and common sense of Real Americans will win and the cancer will be purged.
"Strength", "purity", "glory", "purged". It's frightening that people frame their thoughts in that way, as that bears remarkable parallels to the beginnings (and vocabulary) of some of the most horrific things in history.
" the idiots that can't be trusted to do anything right are the ones in charge of the jack-booted thugs who will ruthlessly come exterminate your family for (abortion|gun ownership|bad religion|scare topic of the second)"
To be fair, the thing you described sounds like they're doing they're jobs, but that they're also idiots, so it actually makes sense to me.
That reminds me of a story of someone (I think it was one of the Cambridge Spies) joining MI6 and being faced with a complete shambles of an organisation - they assumed that, given MI6's reputation for deviousness that this was just a front and that once they had been there a while they would be introduced to the real MI6. Of course, that day never came...
What technical organization could you name which didn't have those two aspects?
What about Facebook? I think we could all name things they do which are brilliant, and things that are... not so much. How much worse would it be without the market to discipline them, with official secrecy to cover their every mistake, and limited to the pool of engineers who can pass a security screening?
The picture I get of the NSA is that the poles are just more extreme. Large scale architecture is done by someone like Binney, and then there are thousands who are like Snowden, with marginal academic credentials.
The form of the argument depends on the two not meshing. The Snowden leaks provide evidence of the former case. The contradiction between that and the latter case suggests that perhaps the NSA is not being completely forthright with the public about the scope and purpose of its domestic surveillance. It's not that hard of an argument to follow, and given how tight-lipped the executive branch has been so far it's a pretty persuasive one.
Not only that, but it assumes the bumbling terrorists (the ones using cloud services) would never compromise their more clever counterparts.
Basically, if you can glean information on the clever ones by the exposure offered by the bumbling ones, then this is an obvious indirect way to track the competent ones. Not only that, but it assumes the competent ones are always 100% competent and never make a mistake.
As they say in the SE world, it's a signal. One of many.
Secret government agencies don't tend to tell you what they can or can't do. So, even if they have hacked into the bad_guys computer and decrypted the messages instructing people to place the bombs you're not going to hear about it.
In the UK we've had some weird private courts (where NOT EVEN THE ACCUSED KNEW WHAT THEY WERE ACCUSED OF (caps because really come on even I think that's bad)) and in the US I guess the intelligence is passed onto to other agencies who then claim the arrests and other evidence is used for convictions.
I know that NSA and GCHQ have very smart, capable, people working for them. I have no doubt that if GCHQ wanted to get access to my hard drive they'd find it trivially easy to do so. Whether those people are allowed to operate at that kind of level (because of oversight or internal politics or they're just doing different work) is another matter.
How competent do they have to be if they have a feed at the major providers? I don't think they are bumbling idiot; i think they are very good at maximizing their budgets and keeping their budgets safe. That's what bureaucrats do. If they have to spy on all americans to maximize their budgets they will.
That they can access my email from a desktop without any oversight is an example of extreme incompetence. Mandatory Access Control is something the NSA of the 1990's and early 2000's thought important enough to demand and to add to Linux (with their contribution of SELinux).
The NSA can competently access your citizen-grade e-mail, that's it. When it comes to real terrorist communication, they are bumbling idiots. They are wasting their time and our money.
This article wasn't written for the NSA's benefit, it was written for the average person who might actually believe that terrorists are plotting their next attack on Gmail/Skype/Facebook and thinks the NSA is justified in performing this surveillance.
This implies two options: the NSA really are idiots and don't know this (unlikely), or they are well aware of this but are using terrorism as an excuse to do the surveillance anyway.
To what end? I don't believe the US government or the NSA are saints, but it just seem odd that to think entire agencies' purposes are intentional lies in order to achieve some vague goal that surveilling everyone achieves.
An organization with government weight to throw around can get access to a lot of things. That does not imply competence. Both very competent and very incompetent organizations are capable of making a database 'accessible via desktop' and are capable of working without oversight. Your comment makes no sense.
Politicians think the public service is a literal genie, which will do exactly what they are told (but will screw up if they are given the wrong instructions). From within, everyone has a hammer, and they tell the people above them that every problem looks like a nail.
The NSA can do sigint, and data mining. Every problem requires lots of data, and if they have enough raw data they should be able to predict anything and everything. So the politicians give them more data, and the resources to process it.
There seems to be no reason in itself to believe that the truth is between two (arguably) suspicious portrayals, and merely splitting the difference won't lead us closer to any truth.
"The fact that one is confronted with an individual who strongly argues that slavery is wrong and another who argues equally strongly that slavery is perfectly legitimate in no way suggests that the truth must be somewhere in the middle."
What does that even mean? People usually say this when they want to sound wise but to me it sounds like nonsense cowardly pseudo-intellectualism. So you've determined the truth is "somewhere in the middle" of two vast extremes. How does that contribute to the conversation? It's like playing the "guess what number I'm thinking of" game and the options are between 1 and 1,000,000 and you guess "somewhere in the middle" and proudly walk away. More importantly, it adds to the idea that there is one truth, that the whole thing can be boiled down to any easy and simple truth. This isn't the case, reality is far more complicated than that.
Wow, people are reading so much more into that than I intended.
I only meant that portrayals of the government, particularly on HN lately, sometimes seem to assume that it's some kind of ultimately corrupt, death-dealing junta that will put you on a blacklist for just thinking about them, or a useless bureaucratic morass. I wasn't intending to make a value judgement on anything. I probably shouldn't have used the word 'truth.'
So, if you're a death-dealing junta, you can always soften criticism by advancing a completely contrary lie? Or alternatively, if you want to attack a group of Girl Scouts, make up and tell terrible lies about them.
>seem to assume that it's some kind of ultimately corrupt, death-dealing junta that will put you on a blacklist for just thinking about them
I haven't seen anyone call them a junta, otherwise, it's not without precedent, you know. Hell, the FBI's headquarters still proudly bears the name of its most disgraceful former director (37 years!), who directed every kind of activity we find antithetical to liberty and justice.
So, if you're a death-dealing junta, you can always soften criticism by advancing a completely contrary lie?
Actually, probably yes. Almost always.
But again, Kylekramer was suggesting it seemed odd for these two contradictory portrayals of the NSA to exist. I was just suggesting that there was no real contradiction, because people can tend to resort to extremes to advance their point.
Or there are different groups within the organization with varying degrees of secrecy, importance and competence. In particular, the mathematicians working on cryptography are probably hidden far away from the regular employees in the organization.
Here in Germany there's a lot of talk that PRISM is ultimately a tool for industry espionage. The Boundless Informant world map shows Germany in bright orange. People are wondering: Is Germany breeding terrorists or is NSA simply interested in trade secrets?
Going by that logic, terrorism is a red herring. By making details about PRISM and NSA's hacking activities public, Snowden is undermining the US's ability to covertly vacuum up trade secrets, thus weakening the US industry. That's why the US government is freaking out. You can bet that German companies are now reconsidering using cloud services hosted in the US, or cloud services at all, or American (closed source / potentially backdoored) software at all.
Don't be offended by this, please, but what could Germany in particular possibly be doing that's so awesome and advanced that the United States would have to resort to theft to replicate it?
If it were the case, I would expect companies to be involved in corporate espionage, not the government.
Smart and innovative people live outside of us too. As for the theft, it could be as simple as stealing a patent idea and patenting it in us so no matter what the original inventor does some of his money wil go to us government.
Sure, but even so I would expect a competing American company to be concerned about that... there's no reason for the NSA to care, since it probably doesn't affect national security.
NSA has it now. Who knows what other organisation is collecting data, going to inherit data collected by other organisations or just leasing access on a "per case" basis.
Once collected and analysed, this data is going to be like a kind of "credit rating". It will show who is a social influencer and what are his/her political leanings and their social network. Even if they are clean, a motivated party could blackmail them if anyone in their immediate circle has done anything illegal.
Imagine if mafia got a copy of this. What could they do with a blackmail database?
Once collected and analysed, this data is going to be like a kind of "credit rating". It will show who is a social influencer and what are his/her political leanings and their social network.
Not that i'm putting on my tinfoil hat or anything, but from what I understand, Obama essentially did that (assigned something like a 'voter' rating) during the last election. Not through any illegal means, mind you (that i'm aware of), but still he was able to win the election handily through efficient social engineering and voter targeting. So there does appear to be a use case for this being effective.
That does actually raise an interesting question -- assuming this network still exists in ten years time, what happens to it? Does it get folded into the tax bureaucracy, healthcare, do lawyers get to access it?
Imagine if mafia got a copy of this. What could they do with a blackmail database?
Strictly speaking, not much more than they could do now, just hacking people's likely easily bruteforced email and social media accounts. They'd be more interested in a credit card number/SSN database anyway I think.
Even so - we still have more money to burn than most other countries.
But that doesn't explain the 'heat map' as a map of industrial espionage. Egypt is 'hotter' than Germany, and Iran, Afghanistan and Syria are red hot. It makes far more sense as a map of locations of intelligence gathering interest.
When an argument starts failing you move the goalposts and make another argument. Concede the original but claim it is something else that you can better defend.
The NSA isn't focused exclusively on terrorism. It has ~40k employees who work on a wide range of areas, drug cartels, human trafficking, money laundering, counter intelligence, espionage, and hundreds of others. It's mighty presumptuous for people not "in the know" to speak on what is and isn't valuable to the NSA's missions.
As for terrorists, if someone were a skilled terrorist their entire life, they probably wouldn't live digital traces within the US. But this isn't the case; people become terrorists, and some of those become skilled terrorists. There is immense value in having intelligence on people before they become a terrorist and needless to say, before they hone their tradecraft and drop from the grid.
Yea, I think what some people are worried about though, are the (a) possibility of many false positives and (b) the collateral damage with "common crimes". In the latter I mean: how far into the realm of everyday rule-breaking will these agencies go? Will you get a ticket mailed to you because you rolled through a stop sign and your license plate was captured? Will you get police officer (with warrant) at your door to search your premises because you purchased a book about marijuana growing?
Well, I'll have to disagree in full with the points the author is trying to make.
"A recent Bloomberg piece points to a 2012 report on terrorism which found that most serious terrorists steer clear of the most obvious platforms—major cell networks, Google, Skype, Facebook, etc."
The 2012 report cited wasn't some senate oversight committee, a DIRNSA (director NSA) report, or a truly credible intelligence source. It was from the Dutch Intelligence agency, an agency focused on leftist activity vs. right-wing Islamic terrorism.
"In 2010, Google estimated that it had indexed just 0.004% of the internet—meaning the vast majority of the web is open for surreptitious message-sending business. Terrorists simply aren't dumb enough to discuss their secret plans over Skype or to email each other confidential information on Gmail."
Do you think that it's feasible for terrorists to use couriers/tradecraft to transmit all messages to their group members around the world? If I told you right now to get a message to your cousin in Connecticut within an hour without using Skype/email/phone or anything of the other means listed, could you do it? Let's say you answer that you'll just use steganography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography) to hide the message. How are you going to communicate to your cousin where to look for the message and how to break it down?
Armchair intelligence analysis is the same as armchair anything -- you have no basis for what you're talking about except a bunch of redacted reports, news articles, and spy movies. Intelligence analysis is a very straightforward thing, though, which a lot of folks working in tech would be really good at, but articles like this are the equivalent of commenting on the merits of using PHP having never written a line of code in your life.
I understand peoples' frustration with what (if true) would be an egregious slight on the public trust. But, is it more likely that the 4+ million security clearance holders are in on some large conspiracy to take away our freedoms, or that a disgruntled worker wanted to watch the world burn a little. Having worked in every facet of the NSA as a linguist/intelligence analyst/programmer/many other things, and CIA contractor for a year, I tend to think the latter, and I'm very vocal about my thoughts on the intelligence community.
Read my previous comments if you want to see my thoughts on how the media has been getting it wrong, and what the deal is from the perspective of someone who worked in this community.
> Read my previous comments if you want to see my thoughts on how the media has been getting it wrong, and what the deal is from the perspective of someone who worked in this community.
I can't speak for everyone, and I've certainly been doing a lot of Devil's Advocating on behalf of the NSA and the government, but I think people would feel better if there were much more transparency into things like:
* Why a given collection technique is useful.
* Why that technique can't be replaced by other existing techniques.
* Why good policy-based protections cannot be reasonably lifted into the law.
* And especially whether there are good technical protections in place to protect these masses of data being collected to ensure they are used only for valid investigations. I.e. there is undoubtedly a policy saying not to mis-use the data; is there any superior technical controls also in place?
Because while I'm sure that the vast majority of the 4+ million of you all are upstanding people just trying to do the right thing, we've seen in the past month the damage that just 1 "disgruntled worker" can do...
While getting into specifics of collection shouldn't necessarily be public discussion, as it renders those collections effectively useless (think the old school mafia knowing what they can and can not say to be rendered into evidence in court), a framework is definitely a necessity. There is already a framework in place, but it doesn't address what the public concerns are. We should publicly answer questions like:
-Is it okay to collect intelligence on foreign governments?
-Is it okay to collect on allies?
-What are the boundary markers for the government abusing its power?
-Can we amend the constitution to reflect privacy concerns of the 21st century?
-How many civilian casualties are the threshold for being a tolerable amount in America?
Just questions to get you thinking about things. I feel like the majority of people's indignant outrage, if not translated into action in fixing a perceived problem, is passively accepting the status quo.
As an insider you have a different view from others. I wonder though if you do not see the forest for the trees. Does knowing more than others about the inner workings of the NSA make the effects of the NSA actions on the country less apparent to you?
But, is it more likely that the 4+ million security clearance holders are in on some large conspiracy to take away our freedoms, or that a disgruntled worker wanted to watch the world burn a little.
Those aren't the only two choices for what is happening here. There is also the idea of a government bureaucracy without a credible internal counter balance to its desire for more and more information. I have to wonder if an analyst there ever got promoted for saying something is wrong. That the something in question goes against the People's right to privacy.
With the CIA, FBI, and other organizations I've worked for, you'd probably be right. The NSA is the only meritocracy that I've encountered in government work, although I only have a total of 10 years of experience so I haven't "seen it all" per se.
When you work for the NSA, you can take a managerial route or a technical route for promotion. This means that you can achieve the highest rank (GS/GG-15) being either a manager or just being good at your job.
I once wrote a report which countered reports that other people had written, resulting in some angry phone calls demanding me to redact my correct report so as to not make them look bad. I responded with a no to all of them, and when circumstances proved the validity of my analysis, I was rewarded for standing my ground and not punished.
All in all, the people working there on the whole cared about doing what is right, is what I found. In that light, NSA stood in stark contrast to the FBI culture of major bureaucracy and lazy/inefficient practices.
As an example of the culture, I learned to program at NSA because when I said I was interested they said, "Here's a book and some servers.".
IMO, that's the tragedy of this whole situation. We're blaming the civil servants for policy decisions.
I think the core problem here is that the scope of what the NSA does was blown out dramatically, because the nature of the threat shifted from the Soviet bloc to various extremist groups that may or may not have state affiliation.
So we went from a world where we were spying on the Russians (which nobody has an issue with) to a world where we're spying on people with extremist beliefs, who could live next door.
We expanded the scope, depth and breadth of the mission, but there isn't a level of oversight present that is trustworthy. When we ask the question "Who watches the watchers?", the answer is both nebulous (in that you never get a straight answer to any question from anyone) and antithetical (secret courts, blurred and cozy executive/judicial lines) to the way that the American system works otherwise.
Thanks for your perspective. The point I'd like addressed, is that everyone could be working to do what was right, but still build infrastructure that is dangerous to democracy.
If the infrastructure is put in place to monitor everyone's communications and infer all their contacts, it may be used for good at the present time, but it will be the perfect tool to quash dissent in the future.
People die and the world changes with time. Misguided people have taken positions of extreme power in the USA within the memory of current generations. How can you be sure that won't happen again, that another Nixon won't misuse the tools of state authority, this time so vastly powerful that the misuse would be guaranteed to produce some sort of blackmail information on half the population?
Ok you touched my heart, lookup Breno Salgado in your prism(I'm brazilian so no need to hold yourself!) and you can have all my data and conversations, lets get to know each other better! Kisses, <3
> is it more likely that the 4+ million security clearance holders are in on some large conspiracy to take away our freedoms, or that a disgruntled worker wanted to watch the world burn a little.
In this case, I trust the disgruntled worker more than the people still getting a salary.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair
The word conspiracy brings a lot along with it. I don't think the government is conspiring to "take away people's freedoms" any more than the terrorists "hate our freedom". They're both straw men.
What I do think is that the government is doing what it always tends to do in these situations: kill flies with bazookas. Why? Because they can. They don't answer to anyone, so they can exert a ridiculous amount of resources and infiltration that no other body could feasibly get away with.
I don't think the situations you put forward and the conclusions you are drawing from them necessarily follow.
In the first example, how often is it that you must communicate with someone far away in an hour without any prior coordination? Assuming that is the case, then wouldn't the NSA also have to intercept, decode, translate and mobilise within less than an hour? In that case using those systems may be fine. Or perhaps use those systems to point your cousin to cryptocat or redphone. Anyway I think there is a difference between what might be used for long term planning vs. the immediate communication scenario you outline.
In the second example, another poster on a different thread worded it much better than I will here, but I don't think it has to be 4+ million people working towards a conspiracy. I think intelligence work is hard. I think people with the best of intentions will always look for a way to make their job easier. Each individual incremental step may seem small and inconsequential, but over time it leads to a massive overreach. One person then looked up to see the forest instead of the trees and felt it was wrong and spoke out. In that scenario it isn't 4+ million in on a conspiracy or one person wanting to see the world burn it's what I think is typical human nature in large organizations over time.
This is just patently not true. If you read up how Osama bin Laden practiced tradecraft, you'd know that he did not even so much have a land line at his compound when they offed him, definitely not a cell phone. If you'd like a credible news source for these sorts of things, read Stratfor. They're relatively cheap as far as these things go. Terrorists do not use gmail, skype or cell phones.
You are right that armchair BS isn't going to get us anywhere here. To that end, your comment is ironic because do know that the real terrorists know they're being snooped on.
While I can't comment on the UBL part, I will say that the stratfor part made me pee a little in my pants. I don't mean this to come off as condescending, but stratfor is one of the biggest jokes by people who do real intelligence. It's like saying "if you want to know what's really going on in the world and what's really important, watch Fox News.".
You know... it's a joke, but it's still less of a joke than everything else out there, kind of like Hacker News or /r/programming. ;-) The people who actually do "real" anything tend to think that everything beneath them is a joke.
I'm guessing all Commerical OSINT is. I read http://kgsnightwatch.com nightly and used to read the DHS OSINT open source report daily. (Both are available to the general public.) I want to be informed as a citizen and as a human being living on this planet where the events of the world do effect us.
On top of those we have Twitter, which is really kind of one sided when you're limited to English language views of the middle east conflicts and social struggles.
There is possible evidence that a crime may have been committed (by both the US Government and Snowden). It is for the legal system to decide if people are guilty. You are putting this evidence within a narrative which is interesting, but irrelevant in deciding who is guilty and who is innocent (which I hope the courts will be allowed to decide).
You have to admit that legal grey areas have been allowed to emerge in recent years that are dangerous? If you want to be given the benefit of the doubt, the legal basis should be open and clear.
One point I have to disagree with is the complexity of transmission. We are not talking about a cousin that is not expecting to hear from me for another decade. Likely, there are in person communications and some pre-agreed upon methods. One immediate "throw-away" method could be just doing a point-to-point WebRTC chat. Google prototyped a super simplistic method using AppEngine and some public STUN servers to get the link going. Security by obscurity, but that's what the article is claiming.
Also, there are a bunch of other services that offer communications. Even something like Twilio/Tropo/Plivo can be leveraged using their WebRTC clients and calling inside their own networks (as opposed to hitting PSTN). A FreeSWITCH server will get you similar capabilities between extensions and you can spin one up in minutes on a VPS and then just as quickly throw it away.
Sure, but look at the complexity of just describing this stuff. But I think the issue even with a good system is that even the pros will screw up all the time. Sending every message via throwaway accounts, from a different location, with a different computer, from a non-fixed radius from your residence is technically possible but humanly unsustainable and logistically expensive. I could only imagine how exhausting it would be. Most humans with this level of competence simply have better things to do than be terrorists.
The argument in the article is that you will only catch the stupid ones with this big drag net, it is reasonable to make the reverse argument - it is very important to catch the stupid ones because if stupid people can easily coordinate terrorist activities, anyone can.
"If I told you right now to get a message to your cousin in Connecticut within an hour without using Skype/email/phone or anything of the other means listed, could you do it?"
That doesn't sound like a situation a reasonably intelligent terrorist cell would find itself in. They know they will have to communicate secretly. The need to exchange messages doesn't just pop up like that.
Why would they not just open a new free web hosting account once every few weeks with some obscure web hoster and upload any messages encrypted and disguised as image files?
To notify each other of new messages they could use "hey, what are you up to tonight?" style SMS messages. They could do all of that using anonymous prepaid phones and use a public VPN paid via bitcoin.
What bazillion is trying to get across is that people are people. They tend towards that which is most convenient and least painful. Sure, HN could come up with the worlds most secure, least detectable, most effective means of communicating with anyone, anywhere at anytime. It will also be a PITA for people to use. Hence, when your mind is occupied with blowing people up or kidnapping someone or hijacking a plane or stealing state secrets, you end up not spending a lot of time on the aforementioned Perfect Comms Path.. you use gmail and pgp the contents (maybe)
I don't think what you say is true for serious terrorists. If they were that naive, they would be easy targets.
It seems more likely that the NSA isn't just hunting hardcore terrorist cells. Terrorists don't act in a vacuum. They are the extreme end of political/religious movements, so if they keep tabs on the radical movements from which terrorists eventually emerge, that could help narrow down the circle of those who are then tracked in a much more intensive and expensive way.
The author seems to ignore two things: real anonymity is hard and people (even terrorists) are lazy. So, if the criminal elements slip up once, it might be saved within Prism, Tempora or one of the other programs we need yet to discover. If it is saved there, algorithms or analysts can detect it and work backwards - or just overlook it because of the sheer amount of data.
I do not condone Prism or any other secret surveillance program in any way, please let me make that clear. But to say "haha, the NSA are idiots, terrorists surely are smarter" is an equally moronic (and dangerous) assumption. I think one of the problems is, that those projects have to be secret to work. Nobody outside a small circle knows if and when they helped to disrupt a plan that would have cost lives. On the other hand, the lack of a democratic oversight makes it easy for people involved to misuse their powers.
I think, Snowden and all the other whistleblowers are like the symptoms of a disease. If you see the symptoms, the self-healing of the body doesn't work anymore. and with self -healing i don't mean the cover up of stuff, but the clean up of something that went clearly wrong or too far. I think, every democracy as a whole should embrace whistleblowers and use the information to act on, not fight them.
Just curious: Does communication need to be done instantly? Couldn't people communicate via something like packages sent via mail or persons traveling between countries?
I always assumed that when these groups communicated, the information was not time-sensitive. Plans can take months or years to discuss or finalize.
Also: Wouldn't it be feasible for communication to be done on a private/custom platform connected to the internet, yet located in a country where the US has no control?
That's if you assume terrorism is all about executing a suicide car bomb. There are other aspects like the funding, the discussion about group goals, the acquiring of arms, the distribution of resources, etc.
It could be feasible, but now your custom platform is a lighting rod drawing all of the attention of intelligence resources into cracking it.
While I'm not sure the article is a useful addition to this debate, there are prominent people from the intelligence community who disagree with you about the utility and legality of the surveillance programs now in place:
Could you give an opinion as to whether or not the PRISM slides were made by a BAH contractor or by an NSA employee? So far we have seen very little in the way of corroboration from Snowden -- I'm inclined to believe that he may have made off with assets from BAH's internal network instead: four slides which look terrible if that's all you know of them.
That's an interesting thought. BAH employees spend on a lot of time on what they call "the beach" while they're waiting for a switch to a new job. A lot of that time is spent on reading/writing training materials. You wouldn't be working with classified documents though, typically.
It looked to me more like something some Air Force captain who was looking for a promotion put together. There are all sorts of junk slides floating around like that, which don't necessarily reflect active programs...just proposals to show that the people writing them can think outside the box and whatnot.
For obvious reasons, I can't comment on classified things, but I was very knowledgable about things and I had never even heard of PRISM when all this stuff came out. Take that with a grain of salt, though, since there are plenty of compartmented programs.
> "If I told you right now to get a message to your cousin in Connecticut within an hour without using Skype/email/phone or anything of the other means listed, could you do it?"
Where does this arbitrary 1 hour deadline come from?
> "How are you going to communicate to your cousin where to look for the message and how to break it down?"
In person, long before it's needed. Even better, if cousin A isn't reachable for some reason, cousins B, C, D, E and F are perfectly fine substitutes.
> "is it more likely that the 4+ million security clearance holders are in on some large conspiracy to take away our freedoms"
No conspiracy needed, just everybody looking out for themselves within the framework of rationalizations they bought into. And when it comes to that, 4 million are nothing. Even 4 billion are nothing.
"The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist." -- Erich Fromm
Were tens of millions of Germans really involved in a conspiracy to industrially murder millions? Of course. They just weren't aware of it. All their individual little steps and reactions were somewhat rational, the bigger picture decidedly wasn't. Do you really honestly believe worse things than this haven't happened to more and better people than 4 million NSA peeps? Such hybris in itself is a ticking bomb.
> "Having worked in every facet of the NSA as a linguist/intelligence analyst/programmer/many other things, and CIA contractor for a year, I tend to think the latter, and I'm very vocal about my thoughts on the intelligence community."
How can working with people who aren't Snowden tell you that he wants to see the world burn? Or do you think that follows from your proposed dichotomy between "it's either all a deliberate conspiracy by everyone involved in it, even as janitor or secretary - or Snowden is a disgruntled worker"?
> "Read my previous comments if you want to see my thoughts on how the media has been getting it wrong, and what the deal is from the perspective of someone who worked in this community."
I did, but I just saw you criticizing specific claims of Snowden, probably correctly so -- that doesn't mean "the media get it wrong" wholesale, it just refutes those claims. The only other thing that seemed relevant was this: Working with the FBI folks at the TSC (Terrorist Screening Center), being dumb and incompetent doesn't even begin to describe what I saw. That can't be what you meant, so did I miss it, do I have to go further back, or was that bit about Snowden actually all?
> Were tens of millions of Germans really involved in a conspiracy to industrially murder millions? Of course. They just weren't aware of it.
This isn't true. There has been quite a bit of research and when Germans say they didn't know anything they were just making excuses after they lost the war.
I picked this out because it seemed to be quite central to your argument.
It wasn't really, it was just one example of a lot I could have given.
This isn't true. There has been quite a bit of research and when Germans say they didn't know anything they were just making excuses after they lost the war.
"not knowing anything" and "not being aware of mactual details of the industrialized killing they were part of" are worlds part.
I have recently listened to an interview with Hannah Arendt, who was against the Nazis from the get go, and frustrated with her friends of whom many just went along to get along. I don't remember the exact year right now, but between 1940 and 1942 she and her partner first heard of the death camps.
Yes, the concentration camps were known, the persecution of Jews was obviously known, and when it wasn't, it was willfully ignored because the antisemitism got lapped right up. The industrialized killing and the scale of it, that was not known, and certainly not to everybody. At least not to Hannah Arendt, and she did pay attention.
[see caveat at end of paragraph] Then there is the fact that the murdering of mentally disabled children 1942 was an internal secret even to the Nazis, not to mention the public. They only dared to do it under the cover of war. [I'll try to find a source for this -- but I remember it from school ages ago, so if I don't find one, you can ignore this paragraph, it's not like my post rests on it. Edit: maybe I misremembered it: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005200 though maybe not completely -- "Conservative estimates suggest that at least 5,000 physically and mentally disabled German children perished as a result of the child "euthanasia" program during the war years." (note "during the war years", it's not like they wouldn't have loved to kill them on day one)]
But hey, I'm all ears. If you can point me to research refuting that I would be very keen to hear it, being German and not into Nazis and all that.
Given that the death camps didn't start in earnest until the very end of 1941 I would hope Hannah Arendt hadn't heard of it until then.
I coincidentally just finished a WWII history the other day, Max Hastings's "Inferno - The World at War - 1939-1945" and though he only briefed discussed the Holocaust in general, it was fairly clear that there was at least some level of awareness that something very sinister was going on.
What you can say is that Germany was not alone in its treatment of the Jews. The Nazis provided the impetus for the Final Solution but found many willing co-conspirators, not just the Germans.
My understanding of the events was that Germans were aware of the Jews being discriminated and forced out of their society, but weren't aware of these death traps until it was too late.
In fact, many Jews unknowingly got into trains having an Auschwitz concentration camp as destination, thinking that they'll be deported to other countries or that they'll get sent to work camps. A significant proportion of them came forth by themselves, wilful to leave Germany. Many of them also assumed that the destination is some kind of horrible, but survivable re-education/work camp. The propaganda at that time included commercials picturing these camps to the German public as being camps were Jews are used for the betterment of German society, while living in humane conditions, unworthy of the rodents they were considered to be.
This whole thing started and evolved in small steps. Auschwitz happened after they realised that deporting them is not feasible, due to the process taking too long due to other countries being reluctant to open their borders to such a big minority and killing them in bulk by gas was cheaper than using bullets.
If anything the German public probably viewed murders and awkward things happening in plain sight as being acts taken for security reasons against disobeying Jews or against Jews that refuse to leave their society.
Eventually the German public must have been aware of the genocide, but you also have to consider that (1) they could have been too frightened of the monster they created, with problematic individuals being in jeopardy of being classified as Jews or Jew-lovers and (2) as a species, we tend to not recognize our mistakes after enough sacrifices have been made, so it's easier to think that you are part of a revolution for the good of human kind, then it is to think of yourself as a freaking murderer that believed the words of maniacs.
Well, I don't think there was anything special with the Germans in this regard. E.g. if you were somehow able to reproduce the same conditions starting from hundreds of years beforehand, ravenous propaganda the decades leading up to it, start off the genocide in the U.S. at the same timeframe, I'm not sure Americans would have fared any better. We weren't exactly nice to the Native Americans, for example.
But that wasn't really the question either. Of course the people should have known what was going on, especially by 1943. Even the example of "working the Jews to death" is horrific enough, and what did they really think was happening over on the Eastern Front?
Which was roughly 10 years too late. By 1934, Hitler had all the laws he needed to do whatever. Also consider that the Nazis are a example of hybris and self-destruction, I wouldn't expect anything to follow that pattern again, other than in the third world. Steady does it.
On the other hand, Dr. Bronner, the magic soap guy, emigrated 1929 to the US, changed his name from Heilbronner to Bronner, and urged his parents to follow him (you can find that on his wikipedia page). So at least when it came to Antisemitism, it was possible to sense it. But on the other hand, there were even Jews who fell for Hitler at first, and were sorely disappointed when their home country turned against them.
So while Hitler never fooled some, he did fool many enough for long enough. And compared today, those times were utterly low tech. Even the propaganda was just brutish. Which is why I like to use them as an example, they were still clearly recognizable for what they were; it got so much murkier after that. You could say it metastasized and got debugged.
To whomever it concerns: Pressing a downward arrow is easy, if you can, also put your words where your clicky clicky is. Lest you want me to think you're pouting or something.
What happened during WWII is a blue-print for what society should not be (like an anti-pattern). Lets not restrain ourselves from talking about it based on some stupid Internet meme, especially when talking about relevant topics, such as identification, surveillance, discrimination, privacy and all kinds of human rights that should be fundamental for everybody, alien or domestic.
Personally I think @PavlovsCat raised some interesting points. I also hate arguments by authority; if anything @bazillion's experience as an NSA employee and a CIA contractor raises red flags when thinking about his agenda or bias (although kudos for his transparency on the issue - isn't transparency great btw? ;))
What really bothers me about @bazillion's opinion is the logical fallacies he conjures:
1) establishing a protocol for communication is done by meeting with your peers well in advance, which does happen; trying to make this problem harder by restricting what you can do is setting up a straw-man
2) you can still use phone lines, you just need to buy a bunch of prepaid cards, tossing them away after usage, preferably with short messages without going into specifics, accompanied by small chat on weather and baseball games - you can make it so that conversations are indistinguishable from normal conversations or from noise, without using stenography and while still bearing important information. You can also receive incoming calls this way. You buy them in bulk, you communicate the numbers to your peers and you toss them away after each incoming call, with your peers being left to try out the next number in sequence.
3) on the Internet you can use strong encryption, in combination with whatever email accounts you want, including Gmail accounts, you just can't use the web interface. Route that access through easily changeable anonymous proxies placed in countries were the U.S. doesn't have much influence and voilà - you can be immune of NSA's spying and surveillance on the Internet, as they'll have nothing - no words, no name, no IP address. They can't even prevent the message going through, as you can ask for confirmation in your encrypted message and have that confirmation delivered encrypted as well.
Surveillance on the Internet only affects the uneducated, which happen to be normal people living normal lives.
4) the world is not divided between evil men that conspire and maniacs that want to watch the world burn - Snowden's intentions and motives are actually irrelevant. And what NSA apologists don't seem to get is that NSA's intentions or motives are also irrelevant. What really matters is the final result ... people are not safer due to NSA's actions, while these actions are a disaster for privacy and for human rights in general. In fact terrorism prevention only fixes a symptom of the larger problem and one has to wonder why the threat of international terrorism is much smaller in Europe.
I can think of three possible reasons (I claim no expertise here) to doubt that FISA orders and phone metadata are completely useless against terrorists even if (as seems likely) serious terrorists know to steer clear of Skype, Facebook and friends.
1) By monitoring Internet services like these, the NSA denies their use to the terrorists. It's not as if exclusively using couriers, dead drops and the like has no costs to an organisation (say, have you moved off GMail yet?) Apparently some fairly serious terrorists are using the Internet in more secure ways, but the spooks have some ability to go after those too.
2) Any big network or organisations is going to have slipups, no matter how good it is. It would be hard to imagine that no serious terrorist ever gets lazy, or decides to take a risk under time pressure.
3) There have to be a lot of guys who start out as Facebook jihadis, and only later get serious and realise (or have it explained to them) that they need to stop making it easy for the authorities to track them. But by that time they'll already have left a useful trail of contacts and activity through FB. (By the way, that's one reason why I think it's wrong to assume that PRISM has been useless even if it hasn't stopped any specific attacks. Realistically, that kind of intelligence is going to be less about discovering big plots just in time and more about gathering enough information to locate and move on terrorists - espcially if you can then turn them into informers. Running "touts" is central to effective counterterrorism, if history is any guide.)
Criminals (I hate to use the word "terrorist" because it has a distracting political bias - we're talking about people doing bad things to other people) are not some sort of hyper-disciplined super spies. They do some pretty dumb things. A while back I met a guy looking to put together a Twitter system designed to combat drug cartels, who, yes, communicated via Twitter. This was several years ago, but still.
The whole reason I'm so upset about what the NSA is doing is because it works, and over time it will work much better than it does today.
The author is focusing on the wrong issue. He is mostly concerned with whether or not the surveillance is effective.
If effectiveness were the only consideration, he would have a weak argument. Even if most terrorists are smart enough to avoid Gmail, Skype and cellular networks, it might still make sense to eavesdrop in these places.
After all, smart criminals sometimes get caught because they make dumb mistakes. For example, my understanding is that Sabu (a member of Anonymous) was caught because he forgot to use Tor in one instance when he logged into a social network.
But we can argue all day about whether or not PRISM is effective. I think the author would have a stronger argument if he focused on the fact that the program is unconstitutional, regardless of how well it works.
Why limit your argument to one or the other? Some people will think PRISM is effective, others may not. Some people may think the privacy issues are important, others may not. But surely they balance each other out - if the NSA cannot catch any terrorists, then it doesn't matter if the privacy issues are not important, PRISM is clearly a waste of money, case over. And presumably somewhere along the line it could go the other way - if 50% of letters contain anthrax, would you not be happy sacrificing some privacy to let the NSA to screen them for you? Or a wider example, what if there was evidence that without PRISM, terrorists would be killing 1000s of Americans on a weekly basis - would we all be so against it still?
You're welcome to make any argument about PRISM. But if your goal is to discredit the program and ensure others like it won't be established, the legal argument is stronger and more direct: Government programs can't violate constitutional rights, regardless of their efficacy. Period.
Why dance around your opponent when you know where to place a powerful right-hook?
Clearly the right-hook hasn't knocked them out yet - which is perhaps why even the strongest boxers supplement their fist power with at least a little foot movement.
Also, if terrorists really do avoid Gmail, Skype and cell phones because of surveillance than the surveillance has a definitive effect of making the terrorists less effective because they are using inferior communication.
I think the next leak will show they've redefined 'terrorist' and that a terrorist these days is anyone who does anything the US doesn't like and is vaguely related ultimately back to national security. So, I think already we've established that any drug crimes (even low-level ones) are national security threats. Bitcoin miners will soon be terrorists I think. People encrypting email are highly suspect and probably a national security threat. People running free web hosting will soon be terrorists. It directly serves the interests of the government for everyone to be considered a terrorist. It's probably one of the biggest loopholes our country's seen.
This sentence made me bug too. One should not mix up the web and the internet. Google only indexes the web (well, and a part of usenet). Found this: http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/how-much-of... which support the claim in the article.
It's probably because Google mostly indexes public-accessible text and images. I have a home server with a few TB of Internet-accessible storage, but it's not public. I can say the data is on the Internet, but cannot be indexed as it's not directly accessible. My cloud backup of that storage is on the Internet but it's not public and it's encrypted, so it cannot be indexed (maybe the NSA is crunching my 4096-bit key right now). Based on the infographic agilebyte provided (sibling post), I contribute to ~10TB of data that cannot be indexed by Google - and that's already 5% of the data Google had indexed by 2010!
A shockingly high percentage of the internet is spam or other junk that is never seen. I don't know about .004%, but I don't doubt that Google doesn't index the absolutely huge volumes of crap out there.
Google may index a lot of the spam as relatively useless since it is often found at top levels. If the number is correct what it is probably missing is all of the content that lies in databases, easily accessible, but not necessarily on the front pages of web sites, or found without entering a query of some sort.
I don't buy the concept that terrorists don't use common online services. Does anybody actually believe things are safer if you use HushMail et al as your provider? While it's unlikely that the NSA has asked HushMail to FTP up all of its account data as it apparently did with PRISM participants, one would be highly naive to assume that intelligence services have just decided to leave certain providers' data untouched just because they're unwilling to lay out the welcome mat. One would therefore logically conclude that with very basic steganographic measures, it's easier to hide among the hundreds of millions of mails that Google processes each day than the thousands processed by HushMail or other minor email providers (or even a fully-hosted custom mail server at "terrorists-r-us.com").
Furthermore, if you use any cryptography at all besides SSL you're probably already on an NSA list somewhere, but GnuPG alleviates all of these concerns and I'm sure that some terrorist organizations have discovered it. In this case, there should be no issue using Gmail or other services for your communication.
I've really nothing more to say about the NSA at this point. I'd just like to give a shout out to Vice for being one of the most vital and relevant news organizations of the modern era. Whenever people say journalism is dead, I just point them to a Vice article. They make me proud to have a journo background.
Indeed, but more than that, they cover some amazing material and actually put people in places and shed light on some really uncomfortable topics. They manage to make news as informative as it is enthralling. I can't imagine a better way to cover news.
As someone whose mother was born and raised in Karachi and who visits the city with some frequency, my jaw dropped when I saw their reporting from there. The local media won't even go near half the people they managed to get interviews from. They were a bit jumpy but their brio more makes up for it. That and the Mexican Mormon drug war were the real kickers.
Well to be a bit more accurate, the media will interview them but with kid gloves. The last time a TV station aired someone obliquely criticizing the MQM political party (as Vice did), all the cars in their parking lot got torched and the windows got shot out of their studio while they were broadcasting live.
Vice has done some really good work, but this isn't an example of it. This article doesn't cover anything more than the Bloomberg one it uses as a source.
Well apparently both Al-Qaeda and some CIA employees uses public email accounts like Gmail to communicate in secret.[0]
The method is a little bit different than normally email. They used Gmail as a electronic dropbox by saving messages in the draft folder, but now that NSA have direct access that are probably picking up that also. So be careful not to make a draft with text like "the drunk monkey sings at midnight", or the NSA may come knocking :)
Don't the people that the terrorists need to recruit use Skype, and GMail, and Facebook? Find the recruiters & PR types that have to be where the people are, and that's one more in you have with a nascent terror cell.
Indeed. If the objection is that people drop off the easy to see communication systems and start having more shielded communications as they radicalize, then the objection carries within itself a description of very pattern that one can use such a internet traffic surveillance program to search for.
A naive version would generate plenty of false positives, but following up on random entries in the list generated would quickly reveal classes of other reasons that people's comms go dark (having children, new job, moving to a new town, major injury or illness, depression, etc.), and one could start filtering using that. Also one might get some use out of looking for clusters of people going dark in various social-connection graphs, and commonalities of what people fitting the comms-going-dark pattern read and say online.
Some clearly terrorist elements have used all three of the services in the headline. It still doesn't make NSA's domestic surveillance, in violation of the Fourth Amendment, right.
I would just like to crosspost a comment from reddit user MarcusHalberstram88 which I found to be insightful :
Ok, I feel I have to speak up. This is why I take issue with subs like /r/politics, and I would hope for more from /r/technology.
Most people who see this post will only read the title and not follow the link to the article (even though the title sensationalizes the article). If someone does actually click, this post links to a Motherboard article, which basically just cites, summarizes, and links to a Bloomberg article. The Bloomberg article[1] cites, extrapolates, and links to AIVD UK (a Dutch website). Said Dutch website[2] (finally) links to the actual report that all these different sources are supposedly reporting on. That report was by the General Intelligence and Security Service for the Dutch Ministry of Interiors and Kingdom Relations.
The actual report itself is just shy of 30 pages long and dedicates one of its four chapters of findings to "How does online Jihadism work?" (roughly 4 pages).
I think 4 pages discussing where and how (it is thought) 25,000 Jihadists gather online is one thing. Making a blanket statement saying that terrorists do not use Verizon, Skype, or Gmail is another. But anyone who just reads the title of this post, or just reads the article that the post links to, or even the article that THAT article links to, may believe otherwise.
> Of course, jihadists are also active on the surface Web, where they use social media and various applications, such as email, Internet telephony and chat programmes, to name a few. They use these means of communication to actively spread jihadist ideas, recruit new jihadists and proactively distribute and promote propaganda material. Jihadists that are active on the surface Web are afraid of being detected, which is why there is no (or very limited) dynamic interaction, as opposed to what is observed on core forums.
> "Your talk on YouTube can be monitored by the Kuffar. Many a brother were arrested based on intelligence from YouTube, they will not hesitate to handover your IP details to Kuffar. Therefore, it is NOT the place you should be social networking."
The brochure in general seems light on science, and I'm not sure it "drew a convincing picture", although I admit I didn't read the whole thing.
We all better hope that Bloomberg/Vice is more authoritative on this subject than the intelligence community or else the NON-ZERO number of terrorism cases involving these types of comms just went dark.
Btw, wasn't it UBLs courier who was caught through his cell phone?
That's crap, anyone paying attention knew that modern communications have been compromised by various governments over a decade ago, if not longer. The smart ones never used such unsecured communications in the first place. Nothing Snowden released changes the fact that only stupid people communicate over third party services when they are trying to keep secrets. It would be like the US military issuing unencrypted cell phones to troops on the front-line.
Even if the higher echelons are better at security the shock troops (disposable) are not always so.
And to reverse what the IRA said the NSA/GCHQ "only have to be lucky once you have to be lucky always" - BP would not have broken tunny if a bored/lazy wireless operator had not broken the rules and screwed up a message.
Just because you don't understand doesn't make it wrong. I agree that dumb terrorists are capable of killing and injuring innocents, in fact I would say the dumb ones are the most dangerous because they are rather difficult to identify beforehand; regardless of spying capabilities our government has.
But none of this has anything to do with my disagreement with the top comment in that all of the world's terrorists suddenly stopped using Verizon to discuss their dastardly plans just because of Snowden.
Apologies, I misread your comment. I've seen a lot of people trot out "well the smart terrorists already knew this" line in defense of these leaks purportedly having harmed national security, that it's proof that these leaks could not have harmed national security.
(which then is a bit ironic to claim that these leaks are not dangerous because terrorists already knew this, but that these leaks are important for civil liberties because apparently Americans did not know this)
First off, I don't necessarily feel apologies is warranted for this discussion.
Yes, I find that defense somewhat questionable in some terms because I do believe the leaks do in fact harm national security. The problem is that it seems that these programs are dangerously close to crossing the line of leading into a surveillance state and that the reason it may have crossed that line is because the people who have the responsibility to reign such things in have apparently failed to do so.
Therefore, yes, national security was harmed but I'm willing to sacrifice that somewhat to make sure our liberties are still intact. I don't feel the need to trade liberties for security if that security is essentially making the populace prisoners to the state for "their own safety".
I also enjoy seeing the contradictions such as you describe. The reports are full of "but" moments that no one seems to be addressing. The media is a big fail on all this.
Stupid terrorists are like stupid bomb makers. A self solving problem. If they didn't use encrypted communication before I can't imagine they will start now.
being smart doesn't preclude you from having someone stupid in your ranks. This applies to anyone trying to hide their activities. And im glad you're so sure about the comsec of all terrorist/spies/criminals.. totally separate, stand-alone communications networks, end-to-end encrypted, one-time pads, etc. why do anything at all? why? because its a ludicrous assertion and you know it. This goes to the point of the top comment.
Sure, there are stupid people in their ranks. That's why you have need-to-know rules for those people. If they get caught then only the things they know can be compromised. Such people are easily replaced. Why do you think such things go on forever? It's because the authorities are in a never-ending battle of dealing with underlings that know very little. It's the same principle with police dealing with organized crime or drug cartels. Most of the time the reason they can break up such a group is by getting someone on the inside that can get the info they need.
I don't believe I said that terrorist organizations were building their own "totally separate, stand-alone communications networks, end-to-end encrypted, one-time pads". I said they are most likely not using an unsecured third party service. I fail to understand why people cannot comprehend the idea that a small group of people need not use fancy technology to communicate to each other. They can simply meet.
I don't agree that it's a ludicrous assertion simply because I was arguing against the point of the top comment; that all the world's terrorists have suddenly dropped off easily compromised communications specifically because of Snowden. My assertion is that the top of the chain in the organizations have not used such communications for years and I fail to see how that is ludicrous.
Everything you say is valid. And I'm glad that you specify "top of the chain" as it is less likely than some mope at the bottom.
But that's my point. it is these lower level people, maybe even up to mid level which are the weak links. Analysis and targeting, it's what led folks to UBL in the end.
There is nothing more damaging, in my opinion, than confirming your abilities, or lack thereof, to an adversary. That's why things are classified, there is strength in secrecy.
I guess I should have specified that I meant the smart ones were at the top, I assumed an understanding of this in there somewhere. My bad.
I agree, the weak links are almost always at bottom of the chain. Sometimes you can get a middle guy that's working his way up but that's luck. In the end, these things are done by getting someone to give someone else up in terms of turning or gathering info. So far from what I've read, I see no indication that the programs in discussion would actually have helped in the matters they cover. I'm sure it helps identify some of the lower links of the chain but all that does is point the way to people to use the traditional methods on.
The way I look at it is that the police could put a tap on every phone in the city but I seriously doubt that would help them arrest the local crime boss. It would point the way to find people to lean on to get the information you need to pursue him, but I doubt you'd get real evidence that way. You'd probably have to end up planting bugs to overhear conversations in private homes and businesses. In that case tapping everybody's phone is probably not needed as you could simply ask the cop that's been on the beat for twenty years who they should be looking at as the low-level flunkies and he could probably name ten of them of the top of his head.
I also agree that the leak of such programs most likely harmed national security in some way. As you say, there's a reason to keep things secret. The thing is, for programs like this there is supposed to be oversight and so far it appears that oversight has failed. To me, the biggest issue isn't that the existence of such programs were confirmed, it was that they existed to the extent that they do without apparently any real oversight. If we've lost a bit of security then I'm fine with that if it means our liberties are intact, or in some cases we're now finding about, if it means our liberties are restored.
The smart ones never used such unsecured communications in the first place.
I think the OP's point that it may have sent them off the grid with paranoia is valid. The weird thing is many of these folks have semi-normal lives. They might be using secure communications to talk about blowing something up but they also have their day to day lives of sending totally irrelevant e-mails to friends and family that perhaps were not secured. We already knew the CIA has used intercepted e-mail recipient lists to build social graphs of the fringes of these organizations. Identifying who is 2-3 steps removed from these organizations actually does have value especially to identify funding and support networks.
I also have to disagree with this statement and the article in general. It's very difficult to say what terrorists use when they are living in the US, let alone make a general statement that they don't use them because they'd be stupid to use these services. That actually makes the argument for why using these services might be advantageous for them even stronger. If you (the general population) doesn't think they'd use it, that makes it more of a reason for them to use it.
Let me big clear that this is not an argument for NSA-type surveillance, however, I don't think we should be arguing against the surveillance using general statements or more accurately opinions like these. Argue against surveillance with more factual/strong cases.
I often say, tongue firmly in cheek, that if Google doesn't know something it is not meant to be known - or exist. Obviously this is not true. I would hate to think that in the future if "intelligence" does not exist in an NSA database then it does not exist. Unfortunately, I feel this will be the case. Let's take the recent Boston Bombing, not only did the US get a tip off but certainly they had sigint from various sources. Were they able to connect the dots? No, they were not.
"Intelligence" is more than just rows in a database.
> The NSA has to collect the metadata from all of our phone calls because terrorists, right?
No. The NSA is keeping an eye on us. The National Security State has ossified into a cult. All non-members of the cult are viewed with suspicion.
When the Inquisition made excuses for its excesses, it was in the name of the "salvation" of the flock. When the Church of the NSA makes excuses for its excesses, it's in the name of our "security".
There are always people willing to be fooled by priests and bureaucrats. Priests and bureaucrats love those people.
Exactly the point I was going to make. That's how Petraeus was communicating with his mistress, and they found her by cross referencing checkins at all the hotels revealed by IP addresses that were at the other end of the conversation.
I'm undecided on the issue, however it seems completely logical to me that terrorists wouldn't use venues that are being monitored by the NSA. Would that still be the case if those lines of communications weren't monitored at all? In addition, if the NSA started monitoring whatever the terrorists use at present, would they continue to use it? Doubtful.
I don't think this article comes to the clever conclusion that it thinks it does.
I dislike this article because it asserts that the NSA has ever said "a lot of terrorists use X, Y and Z." In reality, the NSA has said "tracking this data w.r.t. terrorism doesn't always prevent terrorist crimes, but it has been successful in the past." It seems like nonsense to assert that none, zero, nil terrorists use these services... I agree with Arnor in his comment - this is a trivializing report.
For the definition of 'terrorist' that includes well-informed, trained cadres, and not the definition of 'terrorist' that includes rampant amateurs, the kind that get stopped before they do anything serious. The author has a fairly naive view of what a terrorist is
How is the Kinect any worse than every phone, tablet, laptop that have cameras and/or mics, which people carry with them 24/7, even to showers? For example, I would be much more embarassed by someone posting the video and voice feed from my phone on the internet than from my living room.
>.. may only be good for gathering information on the stupidest, lowest-ranking of terrorists
Yes, of course. And 99% of them are in stupidest, lowest-ranking part. As for the smartest and highest-ranking ones, there is undercover agents and informators.
This one made me chuckle: "So, essentially, the NSA is deeply compromising our privacy so that it can do an extremely shitty job of looking for terrorists. Nice."
It's easy to shout hurray for your side. It's easy to demonize your enemy. According to the government, Snowden is a traitor. According to many frequent HN readers, the government is completely out of the control. Neither of these claims is true, but they are difficult to get past.
Although Snowden is certainly not a traitor, the accusation is serious. His life and freedom hang in the balance. Politicians and political pundits are looking for an easy solution when they demonize Snowden. Making him out to be the enemy makes it easier to keep the country calm about the issues he unveiled.
While Snowden isn't a monster, the surveillance programs are not evil either. They are shocking. They evoke emotional response. They can be frightening -- especially since we don't know how much deeper the programs go. Still, they are the largely the result of people trying to defend the country from terrorism. Regardless of the cynicism you bring to the topic, the primary goal of these programs is to save lives. Accept that, take a breath, then reevaluate your grievances.
I'm not suggesting that there's nothing to be angry or worried about. I'm certainly not saying that the programs are right or benevolent. I'm saying that this is important and meaningful and needs to be treated as such rather than another opportunity to win points in some silly political game.