If our elected officials don't reign in the NSA and its peers while they can, they will find themselves the ones being governed.
The NSA is supposed to spy only on foreigners, not on domestic targets. It seems to have transformed foreign and domestic to mean outside and inside the NSA. Without accountability elected officials, why would they stop?
Our would-be leaders aren't leading. They are being led by their agencies, who are developing more and more power. It would seem the task falls on us to lead our elected officials if we hope to avoid a point of no return of NSA usurping power if we haven't already.
Americans have led its leaders to desired outcomes before -- civil rights, for example -- but results took generations and many jobs remain unfinished. Let's hope we have the fortitude on this one.
I have zero confidence that this situation will ever be rectified. The American voting public is too disengaged, and there are too many uneducated people, the kind who don't realize that Team America is satire, who will swallow the party line and support the government because "they hate us for our freedoms" and "the terrorists".
It'll just keep going, in a spiral of apathetic voters and unaccountable leaders. Eventually, be it decades or centuries, Something Bad™ will happen and the US will collapse in a catastrophic fashion.
But it's probably too late to stop the NSA from having an inappropriate level of power.
You're wrong in thinking this is an American problem. It is a Western issue. The European governments so incensed about the NSA spying program have been in bed with the UK's GCHQ [1], doing exactly the same thing on their own citizens. And the colour of the government does not seem to matter: from the left or from the right, they're equally happy to spy on you.
And I don't know how to fix that. Politicians will promise this won't happen again, but the fact that it happened in the first place shows they cannot be trusted. Maybe Hacker News should secede and form a nation-state on a paradisiac island?
Heh. Western? Because Russia and China and Iran and Saudia Arabia and India are exemplars of trusting their citizens.
You don't know how to fix it? Here's a start: stop grouping people into ridiculously large categories like "Westerners" or "politicians" or "terrorists". How do you think this starts?
The big difference is that authoritarian regimes make no secret of their collecting information. They also do not come with a check-and-balance mechanism precisely supposed to prevent the emergence of the new Stasi we're seeing here. This not a characterization of the people living there, but a simple fact: there are a number prerequisitives in order to avoid this kind of issue. It is unfortunate that there seems to be more of them than you would think.
> So the existence of checks and frameworks make the situation worse? What?
What I'm trying to say is that, there are a lot of things to address first in authoritarian regimes before you address mass electronic surveillance. You can't get upset that a plane does not fly straight when it's not equipped with wings in the first place.
> The big difference is that authoritarian regimes make no secret of their collecting information.
This is entirely different from what the rest of your post says. Your actual point seems to be that the big difference is that authoritarian regimes are authoritarian, not that their surveillance implementations are particularly secretive.
Lumping India in as an authoritarian regime is sort of odd, but okay. How about Egypt? Singapore? Kenya? Brazil? Argentina? Turkey? My point is just that this kind of surveillance is a global phenomenon. My unstated point is that it's a product of national boundaries. Just like the existence of strong corporations results in corporate espionage and internal monitoring, the existence of strong governments results in government espionage and internal monitoring. If you tell them to compete, they're going to compete, and they're not going to be nice about it.
See my answer to a similar question below. Are you arguing that Egypt is not an authoritarian regime? As for the others you mention, I have no information about their surveillance program. But you are right, my use of "Western" was inappropriate. I should have said "country with a functional democracy" instead. But essentially, if you don't already have separation of powers, an independent judiciary and the sort of check and balances which are typical of democracies, you are going to get mass surveillance anyway, as long as the tech level is sufficient, because there is no reason for an authoritarian regime not to do. Mass surveillance is a feature of authoritarian regimes (see 1984 or what the Stasi tried to do). In democracies, it's a bug.
So you'd need to transition Russia to a democratic state before you could tackle mass surveillance.
If the US government does not scale back on what it's doing and continues its rhetoric of "tu quoque" to justify its actions, it would be awesome to see the rest of the World respond by establishing a NSAO, National Security Agency Observatory, who accepts employees from every country but the United States and whose sole task is to infiltrate and publish every US secret for everyone else to know.
They could go farther than just the NSA and extend it to every single employee of the US government and its contractors. Those in the US government pushing for this level of surveillance are never going to scale back until they know exactly what if feels like to be subjected to the same level of surveillance. At the very least extend it as far as every US senator and representative that is pro-surveillance. i.e. if your voting record shows that have voted on bills extending the surveillance state, then you automatically become a target to have everything you and your administration has every said and written captured and published for the rest of the World to read in real time.
There is no better way to counteract this than Mutually Assured Transparency. i.e establish a policy of "If you won't allow us to have privacy and secrets, we won't allow you to have them either." At the end of the day, the NSA is never going away without drastic measures that make it's existence a liability for the US instead of an asset.
The worst thing the rest of the World can do is take the NSA and the current administration at its word. For example, it recently said that it has stopped tapping Angela Merkel's phone calls and communication, but what proof do we have that it has actually stopped. There is no way to prove that it is no longer happening and the people who say that they've stopped have lied for years on this very topic and still deep down believe what they did was valid, so we really have zero justification for trusting that the surveillance has actually stopped. Even if they did stop, we can reasonably assume that they only did so to the letter but not intent. e.g., how do we know that they aren't still keeping tabs on her by tapping everyone about her, but her. You can still assume a lot about a leader by knowing everything her subordinates are saying and doing.
If you are a citizen of one of the country's that have been victim of this spying you should suggest this idea to those representatives of yours that are likely to support a plan like this.
Did you read the article? The entire thing is about all the "whistleblowing" Snowden did on how amazingly good our foreign SIGINT is. Codenames of programs and names of targets in Afghanistan included.
> Another former insider worries less about foreign leaders’ sensitivities than the potential danger the sprawling agency poses at home. William E. Binney, a former senior N.S.A. official who has become an outspoken critic, says he has no problem with spying on foreign targets like Brazil’s president or the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. “That’s pretty much what every government does,” he said. “It’s the foundation of diplomacy.” But Mr. Binney said that without new leadership, new laws and top-to-bottom reform, the agency will represent a threat of “turnkey totalitarianism” — the capability to turn its awesome power, now directed mainly against other countries, on the American public.
> “I think it’s already starting to happen,” he said. “That’s what we have to stop.”
What's your point? Are you arguing this wasn't an article about foreign SIGINT just because of one sentence we've read a thousand other times? There's not a single instance of domestic surveillance in this story, yet immediately the same shopworn comments about the NSA having "transformed foreign and domestic to mean outside and inside the NSA" start hitting hn. There's nothing in the article to support that claim.
The difference between this circumstance and the civil rights circumstance is that there is no party that is strictly better off with the NSA limited.
African americans are strictly better off when having the right to vote as opposed to not having the right to vote. Same argument applies for women.
The terrorist threat argument cannot be ignored, and it's plausible to believe that many threats against american assets are hatched in the US and communicated in the US. Likewise, the privacy argument cannot be ignored. So in this case, we have a classic tradeoff.
To put it differently: are you better off dead or with the NSA?
" it's plausible to believe that many threats against american assets are hatched in the US and communicated in the US."
Where's the beef? There is none. If the NSA does not justify it's existence in an open forum then we must dismantle it.
And it is not enough to prove that the NSA intercepted an operation; it must be proven that, in the absence of the NSA, the same interception would not have occurred and that consequently something significantly evil would have occurred. There are plenty of other federal, state and local agencies that collect information in a legal and constitutionally-mandated manner and they have proven very effective.
"To put it differently: are you better off dead or with the NSA?"
But J Edgar Hoover and the FBI in the past did all the sort of things your worried about the NSA doing but unless Snowden is keeping something really juicy back are not?
So you would trust a proven bad actor against one where there is no evidence as yet ?
That's a false dichotomy. If the NSA disappeared tomorrow we would not all be dead thanks to terrorists or whatever.
Instead, the question is one of acceptable risk. The concept of risk is something the American public has seemed to have completely forgotten about. The (anecdotally) general attitude that has evolved in America is one of pigeonholing things into black and white, of "zero tolerance" and "any risk is unacceptable", rather than one of rationally weighing the pros and cons of a complex, grey situation.
One doesn't have to look very far back in history to see the massively life-crushing power a surveillance state can wield. Just look back 30 or 40 years--that might easily be in your own lifetime--to see the millions of lives worsened or even ended thanks to surveillance-based societies. America obviously isn't at that stage yet, but as Binney said, we're at the point where all it would take is to turn a key and we'd be there overnight.
Compare that to the risk of what the NSA is purportedly protecting us against. Between 2007-2011 your chances of dying in a terrorist attack were 1 in 20 million [1]. Meanwhile the chance of dying in a car accident is 1 in 19,000; of drowning in a bathtub 1 in 800,000; of dying by getting hit by lighting 1 in 5.5 million. [2] How can we justify constructing a turnkey surveillance state to "protect" us against the risk of terrorism, while simultaneously not justifying constructing a global weather-control system to end the risk of lightning strikes? Or a nationwide ban on bathtubs to end the risk of bathtub drownings? Or shutting down all the freeways to end the risk of car accidents?
We're all going to die somehow, and setting foot outside of your house carries a risk that a ladder might fall on your head, or that you'll slip in a puddle and break your neck. And yet we're totally OK with constructing the largest surveillance apparatus human history has ever seen to "protect" us against a 1 in 20 million chance that some lunatic will set off a bomb somewhere.
How did our ability to assess and, most importantly, accept the reality of everyday risk go so completely bonkers?
The more things change, the more things stay the same:
”Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
That's a false choice. There are many other options.
- NSA with real teeth in the provisions for "don't spy on US citizens", or lying about same.
- NSA with effective, non-crony oversight.
- NSA with less influence over cryptographic research (maybe we need to split out crypto into an arm of the government that isn't involve in intelligence activities. NIST might be a good choice).
- NSA absolutely forbidden to "back door" US designed hardware and software.
There are lots of choices other than "You can have the NSA we have today, or you can be roadkill." (It's also unclear that the "OMG terrorist" argument is valid -- like "think of the children," I'm pretty sick of unexamined arguments that appear to be rooted in creating fear).
The NSA will never be able to prevent a terrorist attack hatched and communicated entirely within the US since they're a foreign intelligence agency - by statute their focus is on foreign threats and they're not allowed to collect against people inside the United States. That's why, for example, congress called the FBI Director to question regarding the Boston Marathon bombings, not the NSA Director[1]. The NSA would only be able to help with terrorist attacks against the US planned by international terrorist groups or terrorist attacks purely directed overseas. That's not to say that US targeting of foreign terrorist threats doesn't have a purpose. We have lots of diplomats, soldiers, etc. serving overseas, not to mention aiding foreign partners.
I think the terrorism card has been played a bit too much by the administration. Yes, there is a threat, but it's much more of a threat to embassy staff and military overseas than ordinary Americans. I think it's used as justification because it's easier for Americans to see terrorists as threatening after the 9/11 attacks. It's harder for the average American to feel threatened by foreign spies and state-sponsored hackers, or see the value in spying on foreign government officials.
The parties who stand to benefit from cutting back NSA spying are the people who are targeted by it. Most of the articles that come out just show how the NSA is conducting their collection and then pass on assumptions that they must be targeting everyone. The NYT article we're discussing today actually goes into some detail on who they're targeting. Any tradeoff discussion needs to focus what they're actually doing and whether or not the US would be better without it. The problem of who they could be targeting can be dealt with using proper oversight and legal frameworks - we have an armed police force but don't live in fear of random officers breaking into our homes and gunning down our families.
> If our elected officials don't reign in the NSA and its peers while they can, they will find themselves the ones being governed.
It's so cute when people put statements like this in the future tense. Why do you think J. Edgar Hoover was never replaced from the founding of the FBI to his death? How has the CIA gotten away with decades of documented criminal activity? What really happened in Dallas almost 50 years ago?
Well, it's kind of inevitable given how interconnected the world is today. It was a lot simpler to distinguish between foreign and domestic 40, 30, even 20 years ago before cellphones were ubiquitous and when control of bandwidth was in far fewer hands - and even at that, the NSA still worked within the US monitoring things like communications between foreign embassies/consulates. Not only are global communications more intricate, but more people have personal foreign relations thanks to the affordability of travel and the globalization of communication, news, etc.
What's happening at the NSA has many analogues in the private sector and is to a large extent driven by technology.
> “Sigint professionals must hold the moral high ground, even as terrorists or dictators seek to exploit our freedoms,” the plan declares. “Some of our adversaries will say or do anything to advance their cause; we will not.”
Torture-cough-cough. Accept women and children as collateral killings in drone strikes-cough-cough. Violate our own Constitution-cough-cough.
Anything? Maybe not. Enough to be close enough.
It's easy to do anything when God is on your side.
Bravo to the New York Times for putting out an article on the NSA that doesn't fall into the hype trap that Glenn Greenwald/The Guardian/Washington Post/etc. have all fallen into. All we've had up until now are documents showing how the NSA is collecting information and theorizing that the same technology is being used to collect on everyone. The only thing that does is stir up hype, fear and distrust of the government.
This is the kind of information that the public needs to ask informed questions on the NSA's activities, like: Is the collection actually valuable to national security? Is it of diplomatic value? Does that value outweigh the diplomatic costs when the collection is revealed? What are the financial costs of the collection? Are those costs worth it? What about all of the collection that is never analyzed? What aspects of the NSA's collection/funding/bureaucratic processes need to be changed to best fit the public interest?
I've argued for some time that how the NSA is collecting is not nearly as important as who and why. The initial disclosure about the cell phone metadata was a legitimate call for concern - I agree with everyone on that. The cause for concern there wasn't how they were gathering the data, it was that they were collecting on US citizens and we didn't know why. They left those questions to be answered by the administration, who has published a good deal of detail on the Section 215 collection program[1]. If their explanation is innacurate, then the ball is back in the media's court to pull evidence showing so from that collection of 50,000 documents that Snowden gave them. Meanwhile, Congress is continuing to debate this collection now.
My issue is with most of the other reporting. Most of the other leaks so far have revealed how - PRISM, XKeyScore, the Google/Yahoo collection, etc. What the media outlets have failed to do is show evidence linking this back to collection against ordinary citizens. Articles that would be more accurately titled something like "The NSA collects vast amounts of data using X" instead are presented as "The NSA collects vast amounts of Americans' data using X". They conflate collection authorities and present it as fact to the audience. For example, the NSA is permitted by law (under certain interpretations - the EFF is looking to challenge this in court) to collect American cell phone metadata under Section 215, but is expressly forbidden from collecting American data under FAA 702 authorities. Leaked slides show that the PRISM program is their mechanism for collecting FAA 702 data. Any article claiming that the NSA is collecting such-and-such data against Americans but then goes on to cite PRISM as evidence is conflating the evidence.
The how matters to the people being targeted. The who and why matters to everyone regardless of targeting. If there is evidence linking these other programs back to collection against ordinary citizens, we need to know. If we are being targeted, we need to know the how to protect ourselves. What we've been getting, though, is descriptions of collection programs with "they're probably using this to collect on everyone!" sprinkled into the description. If these programs are only used to target legitimate foreign intelligence targets, then what have we ordinary citizens gained by knowing how? In revealing this, what have those being targeted learned and how does that affect national security, diplomacy, etc.?
If you read through the whole 7 pages of this article, they talk a good deal about who is being targeted and why; discuss the successes and failures, hint at what intelligence has had valuable impact and what hasn't; talk about the immense funding and bureaucratic stumbling blocks that has led to an excess of collection that has never been and may never be analyzed; etc., and do so in a manner that the administration says will not affect ongoing operations. I stand by my statement that this is important information that the public needs in order to ask informed questions to their elected representatives. I would ask why it took this many months to surface, and why it didn't come from The Guardian or the Washington Post, who have had this information for much longer.
If you disagree with me, I invite you to state your reasons why and continue with the conversation rather than downvote.
The Guardian should not have given that data to the NYT.
Can you count the number of important revelations they just casually released here? Just because it fit into their writing style of "making no definite statements, ever"?
It's essentially a raw data dump transmogrified into the annoying, inefficient writing of last centuries journalism. Give us the facts, give us the information, not your pointless hunches about "suspected terrorists".
quote: “There’s no question that from a capability standpoint we probably dwarf everybody on the planet, just about, with perhaps the exception of Russia and China,”
Russia and China are the usual bugbears for the DoD. Over there, they spend roughly ~140 billion combined to the the DoD's ~750. What are the odds the ratio is similar with spying as well?
Russia and China have political systems that can bear orders of magnitude more casualties than ours. China could probably lose 10,000 soldiers in a war and face less political upheaval than the US would face losing 1,000 soldiers.
The NSA is supposed to spy only on foreigners, not on domestic targets. It seems to have transformed foreign and domestic to mean outside and inside the NSA. Without accountability elected officials, why would they stop?
Our would-be leaders aren't leading. They are being led by their agencies, who are developing more and more power. It would seem the task falls on us to lead our elected officials if we hope to avoid a point of no return of NSA usurping power if we haven't already.
Americans have led its leaders to desired outcomes before -- civil rights, for example -- but results took generations and many jobs remain unfinished. Let's hope we have the fortitude on this one.