Comment by criley2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by criley2 | Hacker News Reader

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As a taxpayer, I find the entire idea that the NSA pretended to be for honesty and openness to be funny.

What's next, the CIA is about hope and change?

As a taxpayer I accept that the NSA is the SIGINT side of America's spyforce, while the CIA is more of the HUMINT side of our spyforce.

The entire idea that the techie side of our spyforce claimed to care about "openness and honesty" is rather absurd and hilarious in the first place.

As a side note: the kind of journalism being requested here appears not to be the "hard hitting, fact filled, context-aware" news we should desire, but some kind of biased political hackjob attacking America's spies for engaging in the nature of spies?

Where are the journalists pointing out that spycraft, by definition, is dishonest and closed!

Spycraft employed on innocent americans is where I start to have the problem.

Maybe you're right that I'm being silly to hope this, but I aim to have more transparency on what level of surveillance I as an american citizen not (aware) subject of any investigation I can expect. Or in other words some clarity around my rights to privacy as an innocent tax-paying citizen.

In many countries your right to privacy is legally stated in clear facts and law enforcement is required to notify you if you are the subject of an investigation and your privacy rights change.

Keep in mind, the concern does not apply if you are a US Person. It is not possible to query for your calls or traffic.

You're going to have to qualify that claim.

How would you like the comment to be qualified? Most direct public confirmation I can think of would be the IG report regarding violations, I believe it was one of the Snowden documents, in which multiple people who tried to “test” search themselves or others and it failed to allow the query (They were disciplined either way, of course).

I don’t think there was a claim to the contrary, unless you’re thinking of targeted / secret FISA by FBI, which is a different issue yet a possibly valid point (due to lack of normal search warrant).

As a taxpayer, I'd like to see HUMINT continued and supported. However, SIGINT deserves nothing less than a full (and orderly) shutdown.

Lesson from the downvotes: Silly Unix jokes are not necessarily welcome in discussions about national security. :P

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