‘Reined-In’ N.S.A. Still Collected 151M Phone Records in 2016
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
What humans could resist such enormous power?
Of course, I'd disagree with that entirely -- there's no way of knowing how effective the NSA program is at stopping terrorism and no way to know that it's not being used for nefarious purposes... but the idea that there is a moral "good" and a moral "bad" ignores the nuance inherent in making such judgments.
Yes, and? A computer stuck in a loop also is working perfectly fine "according to its own logic or perspective". That is its perspective, just like the moral judgement of others is their perspective. This does not lessen my own perspective and judgement one iota, and changing adjectives doesn't really help. That is, I wouldn't have said "morally good ones", I would have said people who weren't abused to created an bottomless hole in their mind. But what is abuse? What is a hole? A matter of perspective, and it's not like I can point to any results of my own ideals and actions other than the heat death of the universe... so who's to judge? I am, and you are, and then we simply append "IMO" to everything when someone forgets to explicitly mention it.
Also, yes, sometimes people are thinking they are helping others. Sometimes they are not, and sometimes they revel in that. Are you sure those don't exist? Why do you just mention people who mean well? That's fantasy, not nuance. Where are the lines between those people, and people who hear voices telling them they need to murder babies to avoid some space monster from eating Earth, and from people who know they are hurting and destroying people, but are convinced they deserve it, who have an inner reservoir of fear and pain that, in their mind, dwarves the lives of anybody else who ever existed? And even all that is not even beginning to touch nuance.
When someone implies everybody would be tempted by power, that's lacking nuance, too, and even just going "nah, I personally disagree" does restore some of it, any further qualifiers are a bonus. I agree that "this is evil" does not carry very much information, but neither does "some might mean well". Not well enough to stop the ones who don't mean well, so let those take a number. It takes one bad apple, and a lot of good apples who don't have hands or suck at throwing, to spoil the whole damn barrel.
But at the same time, no person is a completely passive receptacle for the social pressures of elusive active people, to a degree everybody is responsible for what they take part in. Otherwise, anything/anyone you could point to in criticism and for the purpose of changing any organization could in turn say "don't change me, change my environment", in an endless circle. But it's all made up of people in the end, so why not everybody own their own shit right away? Free will might be pretense anyway, so why not go the full mile.
Many things are also gradual processes, and often kind of a feedback loop. In this case I think it's safe to assume anyone who mentions during the interview they'd proudly blow the whistle on any seriously evil stuff they happen to come across, if the official path through superiors gets blocked, would not get hired. Can this be fixed iteratively, or would it make more sense to make a whole new set of organizations, attracting people from wholly different buckets of the population, and once those are up to speed turn the old ones off? Not super realistic, but maybe still more realistic than waiting for people who are entrenched and off the deep end, with a full support network and lots of bucks on the line.. they seem to get worse, not better.
The NSA calls getting data and copying data to its datacenters "interception".
It calls having a human NSA employee read that data, "collection". 99.999% of the data it copies to its datacenters is not "collected".
The NSA copies all your phone calls and emails and web browsing and so on. ALL. It only reads some of them. Each of these articles is always written about one particular narrow NSA program, ignoring other very-similar programs, in order to minimize the apparent spying going on. For this article, the 151M records being talked about are one tiny program to query telephone call records generated by US phone companies. This is like 0.01% of what the NSA pays attention to. The NSA is already intercepting the full call anyway! But that's a different program...
But these still need to be intercepted in the first place, because you don't know in advance which of the 0.01% of records are of interest.
Also, all the data is "looked at". Sure, not by a human, but if the algorithmn can flag you as a terrorist and then humans look through the data, what's the difference.
You also seem to be under the impression that they delete the data once they're done. But why would they ever delete that copy of your data unless they need the space for something else? They never will, and that's why they're building a huge datacenter in Utah, to store EVERYTHING INDEFINITELY.
As to your last point, I'll flip the table: if only 0.01% of the records are interesting and only 0.01% of those records lead to any meaningful insight into terrorist activities, why should we continue these programs knowing that they are, on average, 99.999% ineffective?
They do not, and the reason why is interesting.
In free countries, there is an order to things. This order is important.
First there is an event. A person applies for security clearance, there's a robbery, somebody reports a crime, and so on.
Second there is an investigation. Based on the nature of the event reported, facts are gathered to determine whether or not the state needs to intervene. More importantly, the people are identified that need intervention. Based on the investigation, sometimes the state might intervene with force, as in when a SWAT team shows up at your door.
The order is clear, and necessary. Event > data gathering > investigation > people. We start with an event and end up with people who might be criminals. That's because everybody is guilty of something. It's important to limit the state to only go after people where there is a clear, independent prompt for something to happen, ie, an event.
But what if we change it around? What if we collect data all the time? Well then we are no longer limited to having a good and independent reason for taking action. Instead, now we can start with the person and then figure out what they're guilty of until it justifies the action we've already selected. And guess what? Everybody is guilty of something.
All we've done is create a machine where we can identify people we don't like, push a button, and then find reasons to put them in jail or apply force to them in other ways. Free countries cannot continue operating in an environment like that. Because we've made the law do our bidding, there is effectively no rule of law. And people are smart enough to figure that out.
The fact that the infrastructure is in place and rampant abuse has happened in the past make the distinction essentially meaningless.
If someone is going to justify interception they need to justify collection, because we all know it's going to happen unjustly to at least some citizens.
Needle meet haystack. I wonder.how.many were actually brought up on charges?
It would be a huge blindspot if we couldn't follow the network graph of an organization based abroad because they route comms through the US.
"Likely to commit crimes" is not just grounds, especially under the US constitution, to remove a citizen's constitutional rights.
'What signify a few lives lost in a century? The tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants.'
Just so you are aware, clever tyrants always have taken liberties from their subjects in the name of moral righteousness.
The people who established the concept of unalienable constitutional rights here in America were accustomed to the idea that a few lives lost lost in the process of was unavoidable.
Please stop (mis)qouting this. It means almost the exact opposite of the point people tend to try to make with it.
http://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous...
Having tax authority is essential for the government, and it shouldn't give it up for the sake of temporary defence money; privacy is essential to citizens, and shouldn't be given up for temporary protection from terrorists.
Prescriptivist linguistics is pretty silly though -- words mean what people use them fo
1-stories glorifying transgender 9-year-olds is the type of thing that is now somehow standard on NPR: www.npr.org/2017/03/03/518206326/transgender-boy-finds-his-bros-and-himself-at-camp
I'm also thinking long-long term. Terrorism isn't a seriously considerable risk to an individual American, but what about in 50 or 100 years? What if in the distant future, terrorist groups or weird death cults like Aum Shinrikyo are able to more easily develop or obtain biological or chemical weapons that can dissipate into a large urban area quickly? What if multiple attacks like that start to occur? We need to have some kind of counter to that.
In terms of pure risk vs. reward trade-off, the current state of affairs isn't really worth it, but it's not hard to envision a future world where terrorism is truly a constant and valid fear in a first world country. That future hypothetical doesn't justify anything NSA does right now, no, but I think it (along with various threats from competing superpowers) does justify the need for some implementation of a security agency and intelligence community in every modern country.
Also, you're kind of mixing up different quotes that aren't really related to the specific issue.
But by all means, let's spend trillions of dollars (not being hyperbolic here), and take away everyone's constitutional rights.
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/you-re-more-likely-die-c... [2] http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/you-re-more-likely-die-c...
Moreover, you're not accounting for the US response to terror attacks. I think we can both agree that the reaction to 9/11 was far more harmful than the attack itself. So if you want to reduce total harm, reducing the likelihood of terror attacks seems like a good idea. If that means collecting 0.1% of phone records and (under judicial oversight) occasionally checking if foreign terrorists are in those call logs... well I'm willing to make that trade-off.
1. https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa798_...
Anyways did you know 3 buildingd in NYC fells on 9/11? Look into that.
All the more reason to stop with band-aid solutions like spying on the entire world, and engage in real efforts to bring education, infrastructure, and stability to the regions most prone to creating terrorists.
The NSA is part of a broader picture of US military and intelligence agencies that involves selling arms without oversight, overthrowing democratically elected governments, funding rebel groups that later become terrorists, congressionally unauthorized military action, a network of unscrupulous military contractors like Blackwater and Dyncorp, relationships with brutal regimes like Saudi Arabia, and political fear-mongering and propaganda in the US and abroad to afford a thin veil of legitimacy to these activities.
You are scared of terrorism, and so is the other side. As one small example of many, did you know that during the "Shock and Awe" phase of the US invasion of Iraq, the Oxford Research Group estimates there were over 6,000 civilian deaths? [1] That's more than on 9/11 itself, and the implication of terrorism is literally in the name "Shock and Awe" as well as in the stated definition of this military doctrine:
"Rapid Dominance would seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events so that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at tactical and strategic levels" [2]
[1] https://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/reference/pdf/a_dossi...
1. The NSA does a whole lot more than monitoring suspected terrorists, even if it a hot topic right now, that is a strange point to bring up.
2. I have not read the specifics on this case yet (media seems to still like using "IC is the boogeyman!" slant), but more generally, it is important for there to be a hard line against domestic surveillance of US Persons versus standard foreign intelligence collection. Warrantless domestic collection would be too easy to abuse and more importantly may raise constitutional issues.
I am unsure about this case though, probably will need to dig through source material. The linked article is unclear on if this data is minimized (anonymized) or not, as my understanding is that US Person information must be anonymized under all normal circumstances (and additionally USPI cannot be directly queried without a warrant). Very curious to understand what is actually happening.
I may be mistaken, but I don't believe the article said anything about convictions. The 42 "terrorism suspects" had their call records etc. sent to the NSA under court order. There isn't even mention of a trial. Was there due process? Was they considered innocent after reading the call record data? We don't know anything other than the NSA claims some people were "terrorist suspects", the FISA court granted a warrant, and phone records were collected.
> who were likely to commit violent acts at some point
That's an unwarranted assumption. All we know is some people were labeled a "terrorist suspect". Even if the investigation was for a violent act, they are suspects; no guilt has been established.
A larger problem is your assumption that "terrorism" implies "likely to commit violent acts". That hasn't been true for some time. Drug trafficking[1] and the Occupy protests[2] were both "terrorism" according to the FBI. The term "terrorism" was diluted down to meaning "crime some people find frightening". The TLAs tend to use it now mostly for funding/budget purposes, as yet another "think of children!".
[1] https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/testimony/internation...
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/23/fbi-occupy-wall-str...
That's 40.000 deaths since 9/11. Was it worth it?
Was that worth harming your culture, making your country more hostile to vistors and citizens alike, while spending (very roughly) $660.000.000.000[0] on "counter-terrorism"?
Couldn't that money have been used more effectively, for instance on cancer research or programs to reduce obesity?
40k deaths over 16 years is nothing. It's how many Americans kill themselves in a year, while orders of magnitude more Americans die of heart failure, diabetes and cancer.
And that's a very high estimate of the additional deaths-by-terrorist that might have potentially been prevented, maybe.
[0] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/09/11/u-s-spends-o...
Wow. Given what happened with MLK and others at the time, why are we so willing to trust these groups with such power? The court system exists for a reason.
Yet we keep creating them.
But isn't your trade-off kinda weird? Not that it's bad to catch 40 terrorists, but how many terrorists generate 3 million different phone calls in a year even in their extended network?
(Based on an estimate of 10B calls per day worldwide)
Maybe we should compare ourselves to a country where a Constitution applies and unreasonable searches and seizures doesn't happen.
Maybe we can strive to be better rather than race to the bottom.
Just for context, I assume all my calls are logged and have been for years, not just in this country. I don't feel bad about this, both because I can understand why securocrats would be curious about me, and out of a basic optimism that this won't be actionable unless there is a security incentive - ie I assume who I talk to an the phone won't be shared with Dept. of Parking Tickets or other civil authorities.
Regarding your second paragraph, parallel construction comes to mind.
Suppose I wish to immanentize the eschaton, and step one of this plan is the overthrow of the United States' government. Obviously the government as an entity has an interest in not being overthrown, so if I announce that goal and try to recruit people to it it's going to watch me increasingly closely in proportion to the degree of my activism.
Well, you say, doesn't that have a chilling effect? Maybe. it depends very much on the nature of my eschatology.
Perhaps I am a very peaceful person and my brilliant plan is to persuade everyone who wants to to meditate for 15 minutes a day at noon, thereby raising everyone's consciousness so effectively that everyone behaves angelically and the need for government evaporates. Unlikely, but fundamentally harmless. You're going to have a hard time finding any jury that will convict me for suggesting that people sit still and calm their thoughts for a few minutes every day, but only if they feel like it.
Suppose on the other hand that I'm a miserable old bastard and my plan is to build an army, storm every state capitol, kill 2/3 of the population, and then rule with an iron fist while bathing in the blood of virgins every day of the week, and that I have a cadre of trusted lieutenants and a vast trove of resources to get my project off the ground. Most people would prefer not to participate for reasons that I hope are obvious, and so operational security dictates that I be very covert indeed.
Obviously, the bulk of political activity takes place in the center between these similarly unlikely extremes. Equally obviously, extremism exists and some of that extremism manifests as threats rather than opportunities. It is, inarguably, the government's job to protect people from reasonably foreseeable threats, and gathering information on the environment is an unavoidable necessity in the pursuit of that end.
I don't feel my liberty to be compromised by this, primarily because I have no plans to extralegally reduce anyone else's liberties. Is it possible that corrupt individuals, factions, or whole institutions within government might recognize that I am a peaceable person, but decide to make my life miserable anyway? Yes, of course it is.
But that is a risk I must accept as it is a basic problem of human relations. My personal philosophy on such matters is basically a Stoic one, that I am primarily accountable to myself, and even if my liberty or life should be threatened by others, what maters above all else is my relationship with my own conscience. There is no way to legislate moral goodness; people can observe the letter of the law but still have evil intentions towards others and even act upon those (indeed I'd say that describes how a large part of the USA functions right now).
Adding more laws to constrain government from doing things that might be used for evil is not the answer. First, such laws are easily circumvented. Second, laws are easily suspended, by fiat or by consensus, in times of emergency, and the belief that they won't be is facile. Third, such laws would impinge upon legitimate actions taken in pursuit of legitimate objectives, ie the detection of threats. Fourth, given the existence of other powerful nations with powerful intelligence-gathering capabilities, for a country's government to put itself at an informational disadvantage relative to others is to put the citizenry at a strategic disadvantage, which is to endanger them, which irresponsible given government's obligation to protect.
It's foolish to only consider one side of an argument or to only prosecute one's own interests. Natural, but foolish. I think policing is badly corrupted in many jurisdictions, but a policing power is an essential role of government that has been instituted because it works better than the alternative. I loathe war and militarism, but a country that dismantles its armed forces in the name of peace makes itself vulnerable to invasion by less altruistic nations, to the detriment of its residents. I don't enjoy fighting, but I am good at it and will defend myself if someone attacks me rather than allowing them to use me as a punching bag. Likewise, I come to the aid of others if I happen upon a situation where I see another being abused.
No offense, but I think the notion that governments should refrain from any sort of pre-emptive intelligence collection is ridiculous, and I would no more support it than I would walk around an unfamiliar neighborhood with blinkers on to avoid seeing anything that might upset me. I feel that your and others' insistence that government abstain from any sort of intelligence gathering is equivalent to trying to solve health problems through prayer, or trying to prevent unwanted pregnancy and venereal disease by telling people not to have sex. It's neither practical nor sensible. Just as adulthood involves making complex and often unpleasant decisions about one's person and relations with other persons, citizenship requires making complex and difficult decisions about the pragmatic balance between orthogonal legitimate interests.
We have every right to audit the information flowing over our borders from foreign persons, just as we have every right to inspect shipments arriving in our ports. That's part of the concept of sovereignty.
This past election, our sovereignty was unambiguously, overtly threatened by a foreign power - and we will be suffering the consequences for this for years to come. But one of the tools we had to stop this - and one of the reasons we know anything about this at all - is foreign surveillance.
The stakes are very high, but many are inexplicably arguing that we should just stop foreign intelligence gathering if there's any chance at all a domestic person gets caught up on one end of the conversation.
Besides, last I heard a certain underregulated U.S. company enabled this mass manipulation. (Hint: it starts with an F.)
And you think the KGB is bothered my these measures in the least?
The surveillance gives us the best chance of stopping something similar in the future. First it does so by letting us know that collusion was happening. Second, because the Obama administration made the surveillance public, the national security apparatus is in a political position to investigate this independently even though our country is under control of a new regime, due to political safeguards put in place designed to protect the independence of our law enforcement apparatus. Not even Nixon could get around being investigated by his own Justice Department. I'm not saying this will happen (Trump is a corrupt individual, after all), but knowing about collusion thanks to surveillance puts it in a better position to happen.
Are you of the opinion that the amount of surveillance conducted on citizens is reasonable in the context of the balancing of civil liberties and the dignity of individuals vs. geopolitics and struggle for power?
I would like to see these issues improved by decentralization (regulation to prevent the centralization of power in private enterprises) and transparancy (making it easier to spot subterfuge for everyone), but I don't yet know exactly how to built such a system and if it could work. The CIA/NSA approach is antithetical to that.
Edit: I personally doubt the efficacy of surveillance because I think it disproportionately impacts citizens, while high-level state actors will generally be able to work around by having good opsec and using high-quality encryption. That's also how I ended the GP, but you don't seem to have responded to that. What is your opinion on that?
151,000,000 calls/year ÷ (365 days/year * 10,000,000,000 calls/day) ~= 0.000041 = 0.0041%.
I wonder how many people would remove FB if they knew this. I'm one of the people less bothered by internet advertising (I commented to this about 3 days ago re ad-blocking and cookies) and to me it seems amazing people accept this level of intrusion.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...
Does anyone hear seriously believe they only "took in" 151 million of anything? That's a single flashdrive. NSA operates datacenters. The things they collect are measured by numbers well into billions.
151 million in a year out of 365 * 3 billion is pretty small.
1. http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/10/what-do-they-know-about-yo...
2. http://www.pewinternet.org/2010/09/02/cell-phones-and-americ...
Over the years I've realized how powerful and important such information is for peaceful diplomacy, and that the United States has a post-WWII responsibility to maintain that peace.
However, the recent debacle regarding potential political spying has vindicated my earliest fears - that this can be used to subvert the domestic democratic process. Doesn't matter whether the spying did or did not occur (probably both sides are stretching the truth). We're living in an age where it is at least conceivable by a large portion of the country that the NSA's tools were improperly used against US citizens. It's time for a vigorous debate on clear guidelines regarding these powers.
My first thought was that 151M call records is not a significant amount considering that we're talking about the population of the United States.
Rough calculations based on some very round numbers is that this would account for between .019 and .033 percent of the adult US population. (~150M call records/year ~= 50-80,000 people, US Adult Population ~ 242,470,800)
Extrapolated, that number is a little concerning. By my estimate, that means between 2 and 3 of every 10K people is under some sort of surveillance.
But then again... apply that to say... San Francisco - population ~900K and you get between 180 and 270 people. Or NYC with 1.7M people and you get between 340 and 510 people.
I don't use the phone particularly a lot, and I probably make 1 call per day on average. So I make 365 calls a year. Let's say 350 to round.
There are about 200,000,000 US adults.
So if everyone makes as many calls as me, that's 70,000,000,000 calls a year. Each call should generate two book-keeping entries at the carriers -- so ~150 billion records a year. (Note: pure supposition this is what they mean by 'record', but phone carriers giving them a metadata firehose seems consistent with what we know.)
So, we're talking 0.1% (and quite possibly less) of the phone calls?
Ya know, I'm probably okay with that level of snooping on metadata from a spy agency (especially if they're not sharing the data with domestic agencies for domestic cases).
Ed:
I'm likely off by being at least an order of magnitude too low -- divide all my estimates of people targeted by 10 or so.
But we're talking... one in a thousand people, likely targeting mostly those involved heavily with international relationships.
Even if you confine it to the Arab population, they're still not tapping everyone (closer to 1 in 6, if it were all Arab targets, which is unlikely). If you confine it to immigrants, it's 1 in 200. This suggests that they're using some actual basis for their selection (as you seem to be aware).
It's unfortunate, but if they're collecting metadata for network analysis and if their selection criteria is that it's foreign related (and preferably tracing back to known networks), then it doesn't really strike me as a problem.
Also, your last line isn't true -- talking to someone who is strongly suspected of being a terrorist is suspicious until analysis reveals the nature of the relationship, particularly if you go on to contact others.
I suspect that people who only ping once (or even very intermittently) are quickly pruned as not being useful to observe.
151M call records is incredibly tiny, though they will be targeted and thus probably represent near 100% of the calls for some group of people.
So my estimates are off by at least an order of magnitude (since outliers are likely to be targeted for a number of reasons).
I'm just too lazy to fix them.
It's a spiritual continuation of the work of the deceased UK artist Muslimgauze who's released 90+ releases so far, and who has dedicated over half his short life to making music to protest the Israel-Palestine conflict. There are still quarterly+ releases of his work 18 years after his death because he left a huge back catalog of unreleased work. At his peak he was making an album a day, and if you gave him something to listen to he'd return you an "improved version" the next day.
Muzlimgauze's intent was to call attention to, and make people read about the Israel-Palestine conflict; I think Vatican Shadow has a similar intention.
When data changes my gut reaction is "better or worse reporting until shown otherwise", and "what are they counting?"
2005.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/bush-lets-us-spy-...