NSA Cheerleaders Discover Value of Privacy Only When Their Own Is Violated
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
Anyway, Hoover decided surveillance power had a better use: digging up dirt on politicians, media people, judges, whoever. This was back when FBI agents had to physically tap phone wires or sit outside your house. Nonetheless, with very little capabilities, he got enough dirt to blackmail Congress into increasing his power and reign for decades. So, one person already took control of Congress via unlawful use of surveillance.
Now, we have an agency that can spy on everyone and everything simultaneously with algorithms looking for juiciest tidbits? And Congress doesn't see how this could be bad for them? Even one rogue group with unlogged access to the collection tech could get enough dirt on key committees probably in weeks to months. Whole NSA could be honest except them and still a huge threat to democracy.
This is why I argue that we need to push Congress and business elites to roll back government surveillance while constantly reminding them of J Edgar Hoover precedent. I was sure they'd be spying on at least some of Congress. Articles like this only make our claims stronger. Keep asking them if they want to be working for NSA employees with copies of incriminating messages, photos, or meetups? Or do they want to keep their power over their own fiefdoms?
Gotta be in their self-interest and risks they understand. Like blackmail and how dots can be connected between them and lobbyists financiers.
No power goes unused. I'm quite certain that the NSA is doing this now; no rogues required. As you point out, Hoover was the example. I'm quite sure the NSA has learned that bit of tradecraft.
It bothers me, too. But I'm not even mildly surprised.
Look also at the historical record of Prohibition. There's no escaping the parallel between that and the modern (failed) War On Drugs. Prohibition caused huge suffering, and endless societal problems, and much of it was cured after the 21st Amendment. One needs to be quite stupid not to see the parallels.
Maybe they're not so stupid, though. While Prohibition was quite damaging to the nation as a whole, it was a blessing to the few who were in a position (and of sufficiently flexible morals) to capitalize on it. This was the foundation for the power of many, including (implicated by circumstantial evidence) the Kennedies.
I don't think it would be surprising if some of the less scrupulous understand the risks, but think that they can ride the tiger well enough themselves to make hay (and mix metaphors!) from it.
Also the power networks to considet but they're harder to map. Finally, there's image benefits for looking like one's taking action on terrorism.
So the idea that citizens should be monitored, but not gov’t officials, is intuitive from this point of view. A variation on diplomatic immunity, if you will.
It’s not irrational or uncommon. I happen to disagree with it as much as a human possibly can. But one can understand the position.
It is perhaps understandable in a communist dictatorship, but how exactly is that understandable in a representative democracy? They act as representatives of their constituents, they do not work for anyone except their constituents. And 'work' is imprecise verbiage - they serve. Undermining the constitutional freedoms of the people they serve is far from an understandable position for any elected person.
Maybe you understand it because you accept sociopaths as your representatives?
Now, now, let's not be like that. You do NOT have to agree with something to try understanding someone else's point of view or thought processes.
Understanding a point of view gives you a better chance of bringing someone around. Also, this isn't limited to politicians. Almost any form of authority, public or private, comes with the same attitudes. Think prosecutorial immunity and the like. Or how some company management views things. There's usually a fair amount of "the ends justifying the means" in there somewhere.
Might want to keep in mind that they don't. Anyone can make a citizen's arrest, and the police don't have the right to interrogate you, you have the right to remain silent.
Only a few designated individuals have the right to do so with enhanced protections, if not outright immunity (to much dismay, in these current times...)
(Fact checking myself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_arrest#United_Stat... I'm almost right. It's any crime in your presence, or a felony not in your presence. And for an incorrect arrest, the charge would be false arrest, not kidnapping.)
It's easily understandable if you spend some time thinking about who their constituents are. If you think that group includes you, then you are thinking just like the "gov't officials" mentioned by the grandparent: believing your society is one that is different in kind.
Not to say that it's OK for the NSA to spy on American citizens in general ...
http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02.h...
We're talking about public servants.
They're given some power and privileges only so they can do the job of serving the public and not for any other purpose. This comes with risks of corruption and abuse and so the situation calls for stricter monitoring and scrutiny of the public servants than of the citizens they represent.
If any public servants hold the view you described then they are misguided and utterly misunderstand the role they've been given.
Shouldn't it be the other way round? If I have the power to do something that will affect others, I would want someone to monitor my actions to keep me in check. For example, if I had access to production boxes, I would absolutely want to have some processes/checks and balances in place so I don't mess up, even unintentionally. So why should these govt officials not be monitored, when they go around poking other people's lives, often without any permission and repercussions? Not only their access be controlled/monitored, they should be subject to more scrutiny than normal Joe.
Yeah, their hypocrisy. It's "understood" in the sense that it is expected.
Pete Hoekstra: Obama Stopping Key Surveillance Programs Dec 11, 2015
Pete Hoekstra: New Spying Scandal Biggest of Obama's Presidency 13 hours ago
Not that Hoekstra is going to change his tune on surveillance; he just believes in the national security state for thee, not me. I've always felt that one of the more corrupt aspects of the UK security state was the exemption granted to Parliament from the kinds of intrusions other citizens lack protections against; now I expect Hoekstra and the other surveillance cheerleaders to try and carve out the same privileges for Congress.
Well, only because they don't have to. I'm sure that they will be more than happy to provide the reverse service in return.
The Wilson doctrine was recently found by courts to not having any legal force [1]. As it should be, as it was just a promise made by the then Prime Minister, which was never put through parliament. What is more astonishing is that MPs have believed successive governments would adhere to it - and ensure the security agencies adhered to it - without the force of law.
Astonishingly Theresa May then claimed in parliament that the Wilson Doctrine "remains unchanged". Which I guess is technically true, in that it has never actually applied, but at the same time it was double-speak of the highest order.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_Doctrine#2015_Investiga...
The folks over at Lawfare had a much different breakdown of the issue: https://www.lawfareblog.com/why-do-conservatives-suddenly-so...
Relevant quote:
Was the activity properly disclosed to the intelligence committees? Actually, NSA’s behavior with respect to Israel appears to have been briefed to Congress, as one would hope. “Convinced Mr. Netanyahu would attack Iran without warning the White House, U.S. spy agencies ramped up their surveillance, with the assent of Democratic and Republican lawmakers serving on congressional intelligence committees” (emphasis added).
They treat foreign countries and corporations as being more important that US citizens. People need to see that there are fundamental problems with the establishments. This congressman never worries when the constitutional right of privacy is stripped from US citizens, but not from the privilege classes.
For instance, what does the administration have to gain from spying en masse vs. what does that administration have to gain by spying specifically on another branch of government?
I'm not saying either of those things are ethical, rather that the second one is different and we should be upset about it for different reasons.
We can be upset at both, but to say they 100% the same is not understanding the larger situation.
* I don't know the congressman's own record about spying on the populace, but if he's all for it then I don't agree with that.
WSJ report that NSA spied on Congress and Israel communications very disturbing. Actually outrageous. Maybe unprecedented abuse of power.
— Pete Hoekstra (@petehoekstra) December 30, 2015
If he was just upset at spying on Congress, that'd be one thing. In fact, (and mentioned in the article) Hoekstra basically scoffed at foreign leaders being mad about being targeted for surveillance. But we knew the NSA spied on Congress a while ago. You'll notice he has zero outrage for spying on US citizens.
But the article outlines several of the most egregious hypocrisies. It's staggering how boldly our leaders in Congress support, then don't, mass warrantless surveillance when they find out they're part of the "mass."
Crossing that line destroys the plausible deniability surveillance enjoys. You can't make the 'necessary for terrorism' argument when the surveillance directly subverts the domestic government. And of course thats what we were all worried about, and it's the most arresting sort of example for everyone. And how did that 'unwritten rule' become a thing in the first place?
A lot of the wide appeal and scary implications that could be written about gets lost when gloating about how lemmings 'flip-flopped' after they walked into that machine that rips off their heads.
You can't make the 'necessary for terrorism' argument
when the surveillance directly subverts the domestic
government.
Mostly semantics (depending on how one defines "terrorist" and "ties").
Only if you assume that the voter is rational and informed.
Nothing says that terrorists, or their supporters, never represents the will of at least a sufficient part of the people to gain representation.
In fact, we have many prominent examples where terrorists or people with close associations with terrorist groups have been elected to public office. Some you might sympathise with, others not so much: IRA's ties to Sinn Fein, which has seats in the UK parliament, for example. Or the ANC, whose armed wing used to carry out bombings targeting civilians. Or Hamas. Or most prime ministers of Israel (most of whom were parts of terror organizations like Irgun or Haganah in their youth).
That's a good question. I would say that nothing does. But that's the wrong question.
Imagine that the NSA found a conversation between a member of Congress and a foreign intelligence agent. However, because that Congressperson supports the NSA, they leave it alone. On the other hand, they see another member of Congress talking to the same intelligence agent. This Congressperson already hates the NSA, so the NSA won't lose any supporters by checking them out.
Then, because of the information revealed about the second Congressperson, they lose their next election, and the next Congressperson is perhaps more friendly to the NSA. The NSA looking at Congress can distort decisions made about the NSA.
I feel nervous about the NSA spying on Congress for exactly the same reason I would feel nervous if the NSA were spying on the FISA court judges. It's a separation of powers issue.
The hypocrisy happens because doing mass domestic surveillance is enough to make it clear that the program is about internal politics. But those politicians are reacting only after they discover they are not immune to it.
I've worked with managers who simply couldn't comprehend that a particular issue was a problem for the engineering department. No amount of examples, demonstrations, or complaints helped. It wasn't an issue for them, so the issue didn't exist.
Their story changed later when they ran into the issue. It was now a problem that had to be fixed immediately.
I would explain very slowly that yes, this was a problem. And that they had been made aware of it months ago. And that they had opposed fixes to the problem.
The response, of course, was blank incomprehension. They just couldn't understand that they were incapable of understanding something.
Needless to say, I don't work with those kind of people any more.
We are talking about the government here.
And for anybody that doesn't know about the insider trading....insider trading isn't illegal for them. That's most likely one reason they get so rich in office.
We're just in an early election cycle so this stuff comes to the fore as ammunition against the current executive.
The result is that a lot of stuff that would have to be more subtle or more carefully timed just works in the US. But we're seeing similar conservative playbooks on Hungary and Poland on an incredible timetable. The EU isn't well equipped to deal with countries that cheerfully dismantle their own constitution.
The good old days weren't that good really.
Somewhere along the line the word representative has lost its meaning. They forget that they represent every single person in their state, not just the ones that voted for them. They are a single voice echoing the voices of everyone they represent. They are sadly tied conceptually to their political peers, rather than those they represent. They should be fighting for us, not against us.
This is probably welcomed news from the average citizen, who already feels (and fears) the end of privacy and the endless gaze of our panopticon surveillance systems.
Edit: average Hacker News citizen.
One could argue that government shouldn't be in the business of wholesale surveillance. One could also argue that the government should be hoovering up everything, because safety (or whatever). But when lawmakers argue for wholesale surveillance of everybody except themselves, I don't think there's any sort of logical consistency there.
The "business of government" is not a single, unified thing. The "business of government" for elected representatives involves debating and deciding when and how to change laws. Part of doing that properly may involve gathering information from people that if they fear surveillance may be unwilling or unable to communicate openly or truthfully.
Consider England and Wales (specifically England and Wales, not the UK, as the laws were changed separately for England and Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland etc.). Consensual gay sex was only made legal in England and Wales in 1967.
Surveillance would put anyone gay petitioning their MPs (members of parliament) at risk of legal sanctions up to and including prison and chemical castration if they were to be caught admitting to having had gay sex. For a long time afterwards, they were at risk of being imprisoned for statutory rape if they admitted to having had sex with someone over 16 (the legal age of consent for straight sex now and then), as the age of consent for homosexual sex was set higher.
At the same time, MPs had a legitimate interest in hearing exactly from such constituents, whose lives were substantially affected by unfair laws.
There are many issues here - not subjecting MPs to scrutiny also allows undue influence from lobbyists, or outright bribes, for examples, so there are tradeoffs both ways.
But there are many situations where an elected officials duties to to their constituents may be in jeopardy if their communications are subjected to surveillance or even if people believe they are under surveillance because it creates barriers against effectively petitioning them.
To take a more contemporary issue: Imagine if surveillance agencies could legitimately pick up all discussions about cannabis legalisation between constituents and lawmakers and use private admissions to lawmakers of use as evidence against the people involved. As much as it might be inadvisable for people to admit to illegal acts when talking to lawmakers, it is often certainly part of "doing the business of government" for lawmakers to listen to such admissions to get an understanding of their constituents wishes. Something they should be doing more of, not less of.
Sure, you should be able to talk to your elected reps about how they should vote on cannabis. But if you can't talk to your friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues about an issue, then you may not even know why you should talk to your representatives or what to say.
But also, keep in mind there is no precedent for one factor that is perhaps critical to today's and tomorrow's power dynamics: information technology.
The intelligence community today has radically expanded its powers, for better and for worse, because of its ability to monitor and consider (i.e. A.I.) so much more.
This is actually one of the most concerning factors for me, because historically we know humans can be absolutely brutal to each other, and perhaps inevitably so, given bad contexts.
Hence, the 4th Amendment to the Constitution:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
(Just imagine replacing the word "papers" for "data".)
I would be pleased to see better oversight by Congress of the intelligence community, just as the opposite is also happening.
If the surveillance state has any purpose, keeping an eye on Israel should be a top priority.
People decide who's a "good guy" and a "bad guy" first, then say you should investigate the bad guys and leave the good guys alone. Rather than having an impartial process.
By way of contrast, the United States has killed orders of magnitude more civilians than Al Qaeda ever dreamed of (well over 100,000 in Iraq alone) but this isn't terrorism because, well, we're the good guys.
What difference does that make? The Iraqi civilians killed by the U.S. were not in U.S. territory. In that respect the situations are exactly equivalent.
> AQ is not a state. That's why it's terrorism.
That is exactly the kind of rationalization I'm talking about. Why is AQ not a state? Well, one might argue that it's because they don't control any territory. But ISIS controls territory, and yet they are still not considered a state. Palestine controls territory, and they are not considered a state. Why? Simply because the people who currently run the club of human organizations called "states" have decided not to admit them. So it's a totally circular argument: these groups are "not states" and hence their violence is "terrorism" rather then "legitimate" military action simply because some powerful elites have decided not to recognize them as states.
And if you want to argue that these groups are not recognized as states because of their "terrorist" actions, there are counter-examples to that too, with Tibet being the poster child.
There are also "state sponsors of terrorism", a label whose attachment has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual number of civilians killed. Iran, for example, is a "state sponsor of terrorism" but the U.S. isn't despite the fact that it has killed vastly fewer civilians than the U.S. Why? Because the U.S. decides who is and is not a "state sponsor of terrorism."
There are also non-state actors whose actions cause more civilian death and suffering than Al Qaeda but which are nonetheless not considered terrorist organization simply because they are the "good guys": the Catholic Church (via their opposition to family planning and sponsorship of child sexual abuse). The NRA (via their opposition to reasonable controls on guns). I could go on.
They really believed nsa (and law enforcement otherwise) will only use their powers against the "bad guys" and that they would never be subjected to invasions of privacy.
They don't care if NSA violates everyone else's privacy as long as theirs isn't violated.
Just like congress gets a special pass through TSA checkpoints, they don't care as long they aren't hassled and subjugated to violations of rights.
You judge a politician by which bloc they vote most consistently for, not by what they say.
Weren't there some elected officials in the US who were adamantly anti-gay rights until their own daughters and sons came out as gay? And then they had a change of heart in order to not destroy their kids with the same legislation that they voted for themselves for years and years on end.
As flawed humans it's not hard to understand. It never seems to hit home until you experience it yourself. This is a call for getting a more diverse group in positions where they can change legislation and actually make things better for people.
I'd welcome the day when the US elects into governing position a convicted criminal who's served their time and is interested in changing the legal system for the better.
Now imagine the congresswoman or man who attempts to reduce the funding or curtail the powers of the NSA, and how convincing they could be in dissuading any action that slows the increase of powers, privileges or funding for the security agencies.
As with entropy I can only see the arrow moving in one direction, heedless of the concerns of the population or their representatives.
One of the foundations of this republic is a free press. In his case, you had a major abuse of power where the government started seizing his emails and going through them without his knowledge to try and build a case against him to release one of his sources to a story.
And what happened? Absolutely nothing. No one was charged, there was no investigation, and two years on, does anybody even remember it or even care about it?
Consider an analogous situation. Republicans are up in arms because [they believe] right-wing groups were targeted by the IRS for political purposes. No one is proposing that the IRS be dismantled, or that its purpose is illegitimate, but rather its improper use as a political tool of the executive branch is wrong and possibly criminal.
Similarly, I'm sure Hoekstra has not changed his tune a bit regarding NSA surveillance in general. The scandal is using the intelligence apparatus as a political tool.
Members of government in general have very little expectation of privacy when it comes to their communications, to the point that it's a significant issue with Hillary Clinton's private email server that the mail is unrecoverable in some cases for auditing purposes.
The point of the article is pointing and laughing at people who cant make the logical leap of, "if they do it to someone else, they might do it to me.", the political uses are just the MOST obvious thing to do in this scenario.
I also think the US right is currently so hyperbolic and so inclined to politicize anything that it's hard to say with any confidence that "the scandal is using the intelligence apparatus as a political tool". Many things that would previously been framed as political disagreements are now framed around the president's total illegitimacy. Of the leading US Republican presidential candidates, majorities of their supporters believe that Obama is a Muslim who was not born in the US. [2]
[1] http://www.dailydot.com/politics/ted-cruz-abolish-irs-fair-t...
[2] http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2015/08/trump-suppor...
lots of people propose this every year, including viable presidential candidates.
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
In all seriousness, the chances are that this guy took a strong-spying position because that falls in line with his party and opposes his opponent's posititon. He most likely began opposing it as a PR move, as well. The US selects its politicians for PR skills.