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Comment by rnovak | Hacker News Reader

The only thing that can prove or disprove anything is the abundance of information, which we don't have.

We have no idea how many attacks have been prevented (everyone likes to claim this is zero....but they do so without any evidence to support that, as relevant information is surely classified beyond Top Secret).

We have only the slightest, tiniest, smallest idea of what the NSA and other intelligence organizations are capable of.

British intelligence took how long to tell people that they cracked enigma? 50 years?

Out of the THOUSANDS of documents that Edward Snowden leaked to reporters, the public has access to what? on the order of 50?

Yeah....we know nothing...so saying one way or the other is kind of ridiculous at this point.

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Sort of the invisible unicorn argument. I can't really say how many invisible unicorns are in the room with me right now. Could be dozens, if they're small, quiet, and quick to get out of the way.

Not entirely, it's more of the "that word 'proof'/'proves' doesn't mean what you think it means" argument.

My point is entirely aimed at the linguistic use of "proves" than anything else.

As always, the burden of proof lies with the party making the existence or effectiveness claim. It is on the surveillance proponents to prove their effectiveness.

I don't have a burden of proof because I have nothing to prove, I'm not making a claim one way or another.

The person I was commenting to, however, IS making a claim. Maybe your burden of proof applies to him?

I call bull. The government has a strong incentive to prove to us that they are doing an effective thing, and obama and various other officials have been quoted saying from 54 down to various numbers of attacks, and their claims have been shown to be bogus.

This argument is actually subject to Russel's Teapot, if you cant prove or disprove anything the burden of proof is on proving the thing. I have yet to see any evidence.

What incentive is that? The only people they have to prove their worth to are the people that have the power to shut them down.

We as a society do not have that power, and that should be obvious by now.

When a court decided what they were doing was illegal, less than a day later (probably the fastest anything has EVER happen in the legal system), another bench decided that what the NSA was doing was TOO BIG TO STOP. Like seriously, their argument for not stopping something UNCONSTITUTIONAL was that they were doing too much of it.

You and I, and every other civilian who actually understands what they're doing have ZERO power to stop them, so they have ZERO incentive to convince US what matters.

You know who they DO have to convince? The exact people that keep voting to KEEP THEM IN POWER.

I don't care what Obama and his administration claims, like I said, they have no incentive to prove anything to the American public.

I don't entirely disagree with you, but how do you explain that the former director of the NSA is seemingly fully engaged in explaining and justifying their activities? It would appear that they do have at least some incentive, no?

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=michael+hayden

As usual, arguments depending on an arbitrary ordering or arbitrary negation are nonsensical:

"Is mass surveillance useless? Unless you can prove it, it's obviously useful. See Russell's teapot."

(Russell's teapot doesn't apply anyway, because the thing to prove is falsifiable: governments /could/ release information about thwarted attacks, in case there are any.)

> We have no idea how many attacks have been prevented

Yes, we do. We know ALL of the FBI's high profile terrorism cases. Apart from the Tsarnaev brothers, it has been all cases where one or more fools got snared by a provocateur.

So unless you believe that there is a secret system of arrest, a secret court that hears terrorism trials, and secret prisons all operating inside the US, we know exactly how effective mass surveillance of the US population has been in preventing terrorism.

Unless you have security clearance, most likely above top secret, you have no clue what happens (and if you did, commenting on it in a public forum would most likely be a federal crime).

We already know there are secret courts that hear secret arguments that can't be refuted by defendants/targets. Oh, and if that court involved you, you're legally not even allowed to tell anyone.

We already know that the NSA/FBI/CIA/DEA uses parallel construction to actually prosecute crimes against US citizens.

How do we know this stuff? Someone with clearance risked his life, and gave up his freedom to tell the world. Oh, and the US said they MIGHT NOT waterboard him if he ever came back to the US to face his crimes.

And out of the thousands of documents he had, how many do we have access to? A few handful?

Sure...we know everything </sarcasm (as if you couldn't tell)>

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