The solution is not to jail the whistleblowers, or to question the patriotism of those who tell their stories, but to do what Attorney General Edward Levi courageously attempted to do more than a third of a century ago – to have the criminal division of the Justice Department conduct a thorough investigation, and then to prosecute any member of the intelligence community who has broken the law, whether by illegally spying on Americans or by lying to Congress.
Until the guilty are prosecuted, there won't be any real change in the way that the U.S. intelligence agencies operate. Half-measures and bullshit platitudes from the powers that be are insufficient. Justice must be served, and if necessary, people need to go to jail.
> Until the guilty are prosecuted, there won't be any real change in the way that the U.S. intelligence agencies operate.
I disagree. There will be changes, but for the worse.
Because now those running the programs have a real world validated proof that people don't care and there are no consequences. So that is a good signal to crank up the level a few notches.
And: The handful of owners of the monopolistic media and entertainment industry have managed to make about 50% of US citizens believe that Snowden is a traitor, not a hero.
This means you should not expect any pressure to come from the US public/voters and therefor there is no change to expect from the US as a nation.
I think it's worse than that. Many people do care, in the opposite way that we think they should. There are a lot of people who outright approve of these programs because they think they're necessary and that they help keep us safe.
I personally think that all the outrage at the government is misplaced. They are ultimately just doing what the people want. The US isn't groping airline passengers and holding terror suspects for years without trial and torturing people for information and spying on its own citizens because the government is running out of control and the people can't reign it in. They're doing these things because "the people", as a whole, want it. Demand it in many cases.
If we want change, we must convince the population of our views. The rest will follow naturally if that can be done. No, I have no idea how.
> Justice must be served, and if necessary, people need to go to jail.
Do you really think sending a few scapegoats to prison will solve anything? The problems are systemic. Some faces may change but the agencies remain organized and financed the same way.
As someone who usually makes statements against the NSA and other rogue agencies (or other types of corruption), I'm going to have to defend them here.
While there are certainly people at the top that need to go to jail (and it obviously is an open question as to who and how many), I strongly suspect that many of the people working there are simply following vague or seemingly-unrelated orders. Also, cries of urgency and need are hard to ignore, especially when they are wrapped in patriotism and the idea that you're trying to protect others.
All of this is especially true at the NSA, which is historically very compartmentalized ("need to know"), which further confuses the issue.
As for the future once those responsible are jailed, vigilance is the price of peace. In this case, what would be making sure regulation/oversight happens and actually has the power to do their job. The problem of regulatory capture is the systemic problem across the government in general. We need to address that problem (urgently), but it is not an NSA specific problem.
Would it make people think twice about following illegal orders, if they knew they could be prosecuted for it?
I don't think the threat of prosecution would, actually, for several reasons. But it any part of the government was willing to uphold the law, it might make people think twice, that maybe following illegal orders isn't patriotic after all.
While I'm not sure the effect the fear of prosecution might have, it is very important to stop conditioning people that they are above the law. Operant conditioning works, and it is a very bad idea in the long run to put people in a Skinner Box that teaches people not only that they won't be prosecuted, but can gain benefits like the occasional promotion for efficiently getting "results".
Maybe that's the NSA's real fear about Snowden: that his whistle blowing may allow the NSA's own employees to see a bigger picture, past the "need to know", and that employees might realise that they are part of illegal activities, resulting in a revolt from within?
But why are the problems systemic? Because some highly-placed people changed policy. Jail them. Don't jail every peon for following the rules as given to them (though they should not have done so). Jail every high-level person who didn't follow the rules as given to them, i.e., the Constitution.
I recommend reading Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem". Arendt discusses this very issue WRT Nazis in WW2 -- in most cases, the systems are structured in such a way that there isn't an evil overlord making those decisions.
Even amongst the Nazis, most high level people had compartmentalized knowledge that was only evil when combined. Indeed, the subtitle and thesis of the book reflects that: "on the banality of evil."
Her theory is that unethical organizations can structure themselves in such a way that almost nobody is actively breaking the law.
In that case we should just fire many of them for failing to prevent the illegal actions they were apart of. I understand and agree with the high bar for criminal culpability, but at the very least many of them failed in their duties to the american people. We don't throw people in jail for that kind of failure, but we don't have to keep paying them for it either.
Many of the scientists operating/designing these facilities Bamford mentioned in the article were actual Nazis brought into the US through operation paperclip.
Hardly surprising the organisations that employ them feel they're above the law.
I agree with general sentiment, that things are suboptimal, but when prosecuting people where do you draw the line? This is no easy problem that can be readily solved.
Well, the default position for everyone who's there should be that they are innocent. Then, Justice needs to investigate, and determine:
1) Was something legally done wrong (could be what we'd consider "morally" wrong, but still legal)? [If yes, go 2)]
2) Does it appear that it was knowingly done wrong? [If yes, go 3)]
3) Is there an evidence trail supporting that it was knowingly done wrong? [If yes, go 4, else, check the separate case for evidence destruction]
4) Does that evidence supply enough burden of proof for specific individuals that a reasonable case could be built against them with a good chance of Justice winning? [If yes, go 5, else, go 6]
5 - yes?) Prosecute as many of those people as possible to signal that bad social behaviour has consequences (similar to the banker argument)
6 - no?) Is there enough to support a general recrimination of the agency and to press for legal changes to its procedures? [If yes, go 7, else, go 8]
7 - yes?) Recommend a set of changes which in the future would help to ensure that insight / oversight isn't just a paper tiger.
"Despite the threats, I refused to alter my manuscript or return the documents. Instead, we argued that according to Executive Order 12065, “classification may not be restored to documents already declassified and released to the public” under the Freedom of Information Act. That prompted the drama to move all the way up to the White House. On April 2, 1982, President Reagan signed a new executive order on secrecy that overturned the earlier one and granted him the authority to “reclassify information previously declassified and disclosed.”"
This is truly frightening stuff.
The NSA is above the law. Even when they're not; they have the power to change the law.
I just want to point out that the real issue then and these days, is the potential compromise of the DoJ. In my mind, the level the 3 letters have risen to in the beltway and across the nation fundamentally undermines the justice system, and that includes SCOTUS. I don't know how much of the lack of will to prosecute is incompetence (Hanlon's razor), fear of bribery, blackmail, loss of financial gain or loss of power/position, though I have my ideas about how to find these things out, the bottom line is that the system doesn't work properly.
I am a USMC Iraq combat vet (most of my time was during the "surge"). I spent most of my years since I got out trying to follow the strands up the chain to figure out what went wrong, and quite frankly, every single branch of government, including the fourth estate, has been compromised by the security state aka the military congressional corporate industrial complex. The executive is compromised, justice is compromised, the legislative is compromised.
Nobody wanted to hear my rants on the NSA pre-Snowden. Now they don't want to hear me explain the why, and get too caught up in the how.
My real problem is that none of these concerns are being addressed in any meaningful way by any of the people at the top. If the transition from nation-state security matters to single-actor threats is as insidious as the security apparatus purports it to be, they should explain their logic. So far though, it seems they have decided to undermine in a very conscious manner the constitution of the United States of America, without so much as notifying the American public.
Shocking stuff. I don't think it's an exaggeration at this point to say that politicians are afraid of opposing an organization that knows their, and everyone else's, secrets. And so they continue operate as they like.
More likely they are hesitant to rock the boat because intelligence spending is _big_ business. There are billions of dollars of contracts at stake so even if you caught people on video clubbing baby seals there is going to be strong pressure to not kill that cash cow.
It's almost certainly more complicated than this. The NSA is scary, but it's also not a revenue producing part of the government, and therefore it must justify its existence in the budget every year. Lawmakers therefore must be doing some sort of cost/benefit analysis and have determined (perhaps by looking at the NSA's secret output) that the cost is worth it.
tl;dr: If Congress wanted to chastise the NSA, all they have to do is not fund it.
This is exactly backwards. No politician cares about revenue-producing parts of the government; those things take care of themselves. They care about the really spendy parts, preferably those that spend all that money in a few big opaque unauditable chunks. Like the military, or espionage. That way, they know they'll have the leverage they need to make sure large chunks of those chunks eventually get back to them or their PACs.
That's [another, besides GP's] reason why Congress would never choose to chastise NSA.
If what you're saying is true, then it is (dis)provable. There must be ample evidence of what you're talking about, as the votes themselves are public, and resource allocation by geography is (probably) also public information.
I would argue that if you cannot prove it, then you should consider whether or not the assertion is coming more from a negative, cynical sentiment than from any real fact.
These people are unaccountable ghosts; there's nothing to stop them from masquerading as anything from "retail" to "misc manufacturing" to "pharma". But back to your theory. What about "revenue producing" parts of the government (which is what, the IRS?) would cause them to loom larger in a politician's thinking than the sums of money recorded on the linked page?
Really? While you can argue that the bill might not do as much as you want towards cutting back the surveillance available, 1/3 of the sitting Congresspeople cosponsored a bill to reduce the abilities of FISA/FISC [1]. It has significantly more sponsors than things than the recent SSA ammendment (116) [2] and "Life at Conception Act" (132) [3].
Sure, its not a "Defund the NSA" bill, but it is an effort to curtail some of the most objected to content from the Snowden stuff, and a pretty large number of politicians supported it, presumably without repercussions.
You can't tell from a sponsorship like that whether or not the NSA pressures politicians, for several reasons.
1. the NSA has no reason to fight a bill at all unless there's a risk it will pass. Even then, their first choice would likely be to try to put selective pressure on enough people to just barely stop it. Why? Because the appearance of such freedom to oppose them provides ammunition for their supporters against the worst claims made about them, and limits the whispers about NSA interference. They presumably also realise that a lot of people voting for such a bill don't really care, and will forget about the issue soon enough, while pressure might make people care. Deeply.
2. Even if it had passed, the article and others demonstrates that the NSA have in the past shown willingness to do everything from blatantly ignoring the law, to have executive orders passed to legalise activities Congress have not approved of, so there is little incentive to apply broad, gross pressure even when facing the threat of bills targeting them.
3. Timing. They may very well believe that accepting curtailment in the short term given the post-Snowden climate is a better way of riding out the storm. Easier to apply "gentle pressure" once the storm has passed, to quietly expand their legal headroom again.
This means I also think koops is somewhat wrong: Most politicians probably don't fear the NSA all that much, because the NSA have had no reason to make the politicians fear them. They're not backed up against the wall, facing the threat of legal action or being shut down. Broadly applied fear is dangerous because it risks creating broad opposition of people who are united in fear of what has made itself a common enemy.
Even if fear becomes their only weapon, NSA only needs to make the right politicians fear them to stop bills, or get executive orders passed. Whether they have, or if they're simply so confident in their effective immunity against actually following decisions from Congress is another matter.
>In addition, calling the crimes “an international cause célèbre involving fundamental constitutional rights of United States citizens,” the task force pointed to the likelihood that the NSA would put political pressure on anyone who dared to testify against it. What’s more, the report added, defense attorneys for senior NSA officials would likely subpoena “every tenuously involved government official and former official” to establish that the illegal operations had been authorized from on high. “While the high office of prospective defense witnesses should not enter into the prosecutive decision,” the report noted, “the confusion, obfuscation, and surprise testimony which might result cannot be ignored.”
"But then the NSA got its revenge—when they handed me the 6,000 pages, they were all out of order, as if they had been shuffled like a new deck of cards"
A good occasion to practice one of those n log n sorting algorithms manually.
I do not think pages were numbered 1-6000. I think there were multiple documents, so you would need to do something like:
1. Split all the pages into piles for page 1, page 2, page 3, etc...
2. Look at highest page pile first, because it would have least number of documents, work backward through page piles searching for matching previous page until you extract all of the pages[0] for that document.
[0] If pages were heavily blanked out, identification might have been difficult.
Back then it wasn't likely. Today? If the NSA has secure rooms for viewing confidential documents that can not leave the room? It seems pretty darn likely it is a faraday cage. You think they don't know what they're doing? Or don't have the money in their budget?
In this scenario, leaving with or otherwise distributing a copy of the document would be equivalent to walking out the door with the original. Do you really think the NSA wouldn't be able to prevent that from happening?
I didn't think the NSA would be hopelessly humiliated by a lone syadmin currently residing in Russia to protect himself from a lack of due process, but here we are.
Snowden was considered an insider. Here a person considered an outsider would be in a controlled environment with the specific purpose of restricting the flow of information.
This story probably only hints at the truly terrifying power that the NSA can bring to bear. I do not think anyone is disputing the need to collect intelligence but the scale and scope of the NSA's no-holds-barred all the information all the time approach needs to be reigned in.
At this point (ironically) it may be fair to start treating them as one of the biggest threats to the functioning of democracy in the US.
Not terrorists, not violent militia, not soft money, not Income inequality - but an agency with virtually unchecked powers, opaque budget, no due process that Govt. Officials themselves daren't speak against for fear of embarrassment or worse.
That document is surprisingly readable! I expected something very dry and bureaucratic, but this is written at a high level with historical context, and narrative.
To think if someone was to go up against the NSA today in a similar fashion, they would be in jail. Unless they were able to escape the country to hide out somewhere like say... Russia.
Not sure why I was downvoted here. Maybe this was interpreted as snark. I assure you that it was not. I am genuinely concerned that reading about snowden and NSA issues "flags" me and puts me on a list. I Don't feel like I've anything to hide, but it seems that the NSA wants this to go away. Maybe I'm paranoid.
We know the NSA and GHCQ really do get involved in forums like this to push their propaganda. I would have thought that was a seriously paranoid conspiracy theory a year ago but it isn't is it?
If they were sending people off to concentration camps, I'd be cautious. As it is, I'd be proud to be on some NSA list. Come on, let's do it, NSA. What exactly are you going to with me on such a list, browse my porn?
I can see where you are coming from with that sentiment, kind of "they can't arrest everyone". I guess what scares me is if things do escalate to a tipping point life could really suck for the group that gets targeted. I even generally think that the NSA is mostly filled with good people that want to do public good. As big as snowden and the evesdropping story got, I still think that most of the mainstream public thinks snowden did something WRONG akin to espionage. Its one of those things that when reported on your average news channel is easy to dismiss as just some rogue bad actor with an ax to grind. The more I think on this the more I am blown away at what he did. This guy DID put a target on his back. He exiled himself from his life over this. I wouldnt be surprised if he was on a hit list. I think of having to be in his shoes, and dont think I would have that same courage.
Sure, but my point is that we're nowhere near Snowden. I wouldn't want to be him, but to be the guy who gets put on some list with a million other people for reading and discussing an article that's critical of the NSA? Bring it on.
That "rule" is ludicrous anyway. Even if one were to assume that an average separation of 6-7 is really the case even today, the separation to "important people" is likely to be far lower, if one assumes that "important people" on average have more social connections, because most of us on average will have fewer connections than our connections, who again are on average connected to people with more connections than themselves.
For my part, for example, I have met various relatively low level Norwegian politicians and trade union people that have huge networks. These low level politicians, for example have met people with vastly more influence, such as Castro (communist politician who moved to Cuba; these days he's converted to Islam, become a social democrat, and runs a shipping company in Norway..), Mao (trade union guy who has a picture of himself with Obama from some meet and greet in the 60's), Obama (hand shakes during some visit), the new secretary general of NATO (he's ex-Norwegian prime minister for the labour party - every member of parliament in recent years and most Labour party members have met him, so most Norwegians will only have one step between them and him), the Dalai Lama (large numbers of Norwegian politicians have met him), just to mention some random names, though most of them will have done little more than shake hands.
Extend it one level, and the people I know will have worked closely with people who have worked closely with the people mentioned.
Most people will be able to find paths to someone that the NSA could use to justify surveillance if they want to in 3 degrees or less. Of course, in most cases these people will not have discussed anything that would give the NSA a legitimate reason for interest.
So the 3-degrees thing basically amounts to saying they can conduct surveillance of everyone they bloody well please, as long as they can be bothered to identify a suitable connection.
> The agency’s metadata collection program now targets everyone in the country old enough to hold a phone. The gargantuan data storage facility it has built in Utah may eventually hold zettabytes (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of information. And the massive supercomputer that the NSA is secretly building in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, will search through it all at exaflop (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second) speeds.
That suggests a "Drake Equation" type estimate, probably something similar to:
density = current_disk_density * moores_law * official_estimate_of_project_lifetime
total = building_area * density * "round up for reporters/management" * propaganda multiplier
round_up_to_next_si_prefix(total)
The actual value is probably somewhere between "current (much smaller) need" and "how much do we need expand the budget", both of which are far smaller than those numbers.
I was intrigued by the mention of the "Black Chamber," alias the Cipher Bureau and the predecessor of the NSA. Looking it up, I was further intrigued by mentions of institutional cryptography in Elisabethan England and so on. If I'm interested in this at a purely layman's level (I'm more into the history than the practical implications today) what books or essays would you recommend my reading?
The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication[0] by David Kahn is probably the best book in this area. Be warned it sits on many bookshelves but due to its length few are the number that have finished it, none the less it is an extremely rewarding read. It has oddles and oddles of stories about cryptographers you have never heard of doing awesome things, including the history and personalities behind many of the Black Chambers of Europe.
The story mentions David Kahn's "monumental history of cryptology". The book is The Codebreakers,[1] and IMO is definitely worth reading. It's quite long, perhaps too detailed for most people. But it's filled with little gems. E.g. did you know that Thomas Jefferson invented the "wheel cypher",[2] a very elegant and practical device used in secret communication?
Simon Singh's The Code Book[1] is excellent, if around 10 years old:
The Code Book covers diverse historical topics including the Man in the Iron Mask, Arabic cryptography, Charles Babbage, the mechanisation of cryptography, the Enigma machine, and the decryption of Linear B and other ancient writing systems.
Later sections cover the development of public-key cryptography. Some of this material is based on interviews with participants, including persons who worked in secret at GCHQ.[2]
nice. Everybody of course knows (at least deep inside oneself if the one is too obtuse to acknowledge it publicly) that, starting from the ancient times, all the encrypted communication stuff around has always been backdoored, yet seeing actual confirmation is always assuring :
"Others contained clues to a secret trips that Friedman had made to Switzerland, where he helped the agency gain backdoor access into encryption systems that a Swiss company was selling to foreign countries."
A great starting point is asking how many general purpose computers are on your phone. My count is currently 2-4. Your primary OS, the one you interact with. The radio baseband, which you don't have control over. Your SIM card which can speak to the baseband without your primary OS. Lastly depending on your storage, (SD Card) may have it's own cpu, but this (I don't believe in general) can be accessed by the baseband or sim card without passing through the primary os.
I've been thinking lately about a way to address this: get a "phone" with no cell hardware, and pair it with a cellular/WiFi bridge such as MiFi. Get internet-based replacement services for voice calls and texts. Now you have one less undocumented interface or super-privileged CPU to worry about.
There's a lot of practicality questions in terms of battery life, expense, convenience to carry around, but for certain security scenarios it seems like a step forward.
Until the guilty are prosecuted, there won't be any real change in the way that the U.S. intelligence agencies operate. Half-measures and bullshit platitudes from the powers that be are insufficient. Justice must be served, and if necessary, people need to go to jail.