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Comment by iambateman | Hacker News Reader

I, as a taxpayer, pay the NSA to be effective in defending national interests, to act with integrity, and to submit themselves to the oversight of my representatives in Congress.

I have no expectation that they will be honest or open with me. Being closed is integral to their work.

However they damn well better submit to oversight and respect my constitutional rights as a citizen.

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If history is any judge, as I recall from several recent reads on NSA post-Snowden / Stuxnet etc: Even the most outspoken critic of the NSA (I want to say it was a State attorney or something) was quick to reverse his critiques when he was granted control of an oversight investigation - he was actually shocked at the amount of integrity and openness that he found WITHIN the organization. Doesn't mean it is visible to others.

I'll try to find the references.

I wonder how much blackmail material he was shown just before he dramatically reversed his opinion.

I am very cynical. But then a long chain of recorded history rewards my point of view.

I wonder how many PR bots the NSA has on sites like Hacker News.

They are a government agency with a nearly endless supply of money granted to them by Congress every year without fail. They don't need to do PR for anyone except to gain more employees.

> They don't need to do PR for anyone except to gain more employees.

Which is exactly why I implied they would be primarily doing PR on sites with high concentrations of people with the skillsets they need...such as Hacker News. This would help them both directly - individuals seeing good PR and thinking "hey, I could work there" - and indirectly by way of combating the general negative perceptions of the NSA in the tech community since the Snowden leaks.

There was an article recently on HN about how they're losing talent.

Not now, but buying a little insurance on that seems prudent.

They don't need to be crooks, either, doesn't seem to stop them. They don't need to come up with childish logos combined with super cereal latin text, but they're still doing it; something like "Total Information Awareness" isn't the expression of a need, it's the symptom of serious issues. If they knew what they needed they wouldn't be doing what they're doing, and wouldn't need to circle the wagons of the "Intelligence Community" for emotional support.

Do companies that pollute the environment and obsess about environmental activists so much that their undercover people outnumber the undercover agents of intelligence agencies NEED to be so very pathetic? I'd say they "just" need to stop whatever they think they are doing and be grateful towards those giving them a hint, but nope -- they can't eat what's on their plate, so they shit in our food. And anyone even dreaming of suggesting putting first things first probably wouldn't make it past apprentice in most such orgs.

After Trump won, I desperately wanted the "grassy knoll video" and "shadow government" stuff to actually be real.

Maybe they've just been really effective at making people think that they're all-powerful entities that make people disappear on a whim.

You should really meet someone who works at NSA. Snowden worked there before he left. It’s generally a group of ridiculously smart people. Policy is where stuff gets bungled.

But this doesn't change the fact that the Snowden revelations were just as shocking to many members of Congress.

Although who knows, they might also be feigning surprise.

But after a certain point, if you think everyone is lying about everything, then what kind of existence is that?

It's unlikely they were feigning. Even the members of the house & senate intelligence committees do not get thorough and uniform access to intel.

In the past, those members of the political party that is out of power have been routinely excluded from agency briefings and documents. In practice, the fraction of these two committees that is well informed about the agency's current activities is likely to be very small.

And after the undeniable perjured testimony of Clapper before congress denying all NSA spying on civilians, and subsequent failure by Justice to prosecute or even investigate Clapper et al, the likelihood that anyone will know what NSA or CIA actually does (unless they live at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, that is) is effectively nil.

This is silly.

The DNI takes an oath to keep state secrets a secret. He then takes an oath to tell the truth to Congress in an open session, which is itself an oxymoron when discussing a huge bulk of the national intelligence apparatus because we demand so much secrecy around every damn thing. How do you have an open session and not pretty much immediately invite some sort oath violation? It's the dumbest fucking thing in the first place but we like to play pretend to be open while simultaneously having metric f tons of state secrets.

There's a very long list of people who have appeared before Congress and lied under oath, and not referred for undeniable perjury charges. And they do not have the president of the United States giving them a defacto pass by saying Clapper was caught between a rock and a hard place. There is no f'n goddamn way Clapper was ever going to be charged with perjury. It's the dumbest line of logic, you need to go backwards in time to have this argument. It has nothing to do with Clapper. Go point a finger at people like Cheney and Feinstein if you want to whine about the massively neurotic security state.

And the idea you're going to find out jack shit about what's going on at CIA or NSA by charging Clapper with perjury is pure stupidity. If you want to know what happens at NSA and CIA, you need a society, in large numbers, who aren't paranoid and servile, and won't elect paranoid and servile representatives, who then accept the creation of a paranoid control freak surveillance state. We have what we have as a reflection of who we are, in particular those who do not participate. That's exactly how you get this kind of result.

It's common practice for anyone called to testify before congress to request a closed session if they believe their testimony will violate their oath of secrecy. Clapper did not. Instead he testified before open congress and lied, which was unnecessary, unless he was guilty of the charges in question -- knowingly directing NSA staff to spy on Americans, which the NSA's charter explicitly disallows.

Therefore Clapper deliberately misled authorities in order to escape prosecution for a crime.

That is the very definition of perjury.

[flagged]

This degree of incivility is a bannable offence on Hacker News regardless of how wrong someone else is. Please don't do this again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It is uncivil to try to gaslight one person for the sins of society, and I would consider it unethical to not call someone out for having done so.

which is even more concerning considering reports of how the current resident of 1600 assesses intelligence.

That is called existence in the world of espionage / counter-espionage. It doesn't really track with the existence of everyday people, or legislative bodies.

It should with legislative bodies because they have direct oversight.

Sort of a catch 22 there, right? You expect integrity, but without honesty/openness, how do you hold them to it?

You elect representatives and executives who are given security clearances and the right to great transparency and openness. When or if those elected officials are found to have abused the public trust, you punish them, their associates and their successors at the ballot box and in the court of public opinion.

It's not a great process but I don't see a better way for a democracy to have an internationally competitive intelligence apparatus. And without such an apparatus we are exposed to attacks on our democratic integrity, military effectiveness, deliberative privacy and much more.

We are currently paying the costs (both monetary and otherwise) for the apparatus you describe, but looking at the last decade, the benefits appear to be absent. Perhaps we need to consider the possibility that an organization like the NSA just isn't worth having?

Your comment shows why some more open-ness would be great for everyone. Working in secret means nobody will know of the genuine successes, only the allegedly problematic aspects which leak out.

It might not be simple, but I am sure that it would be possible to remove classified details from certain “wins” (whether counterterror, counterproliferation, or other) and let the public know what their tax dollars are going toward.

Why are they "genuine successes", but only "alleged problems"? I think you're giving them credit for alleged successes and ignoring the genuine problems.

I used this phrase:

> allegedly problematic aspects which leak out

Due to the problematic aspects being judged solely by the journalists publishing the leak.

For example, the business records collection on Verizon metadata was something The Guardian saw as problematic and worth exposing, and I agree on it being problematic, so I was glad to see it fixed in 2015 (They now must ask the ISP for information in a more targeted manner instead of getting it all and self-regulating targets).

On the other hand, Spiegel alleged that TAO and CNE-related activities are problematic. I disagree with that and did not see any point in those releases.

Hopefully that makes more sense, I did not mean to imply anything with my phrasing.

In fact organizations like the CIA and NSA are more of a threat to the American people than the people they are supposedly protecting us from.

I suspect it's like inoculation: some people die from inoculations, but on the whole the herd gains valuable protection.

The TLA may be terrible for particular individuals, or small groups with a shared characteristic, but politicians should nonetheless advocate for them to protect the "way of life of citizens".

It's a "do you keep a guard dog that you know might maul a child" type of question.

Not necessarily disagreeing but: facts? numbers? source?

By nature of the secrecy required by how the NSA operates, many of the benefits would likewise not be made public (to avoid sharing unnecessary information on how they operate), so I'm not entirely sure it's fair for any of us out of the know to weigh the benefits versus the costs in this way.

Our elected members privy to the actual costs and the actual benefits should be the ones making the decision on whether the NSA is worth having or not.

You could change NSA to CIA and your comment would still be just as invalid. We aren't supposed to know much of the work they do. We know that ultimately their data helps law enforcement agencies do their jobs, and helps the DoD / Executive branch make more informed decisions about our adversaries. It is infinitely difficult to quantify the value provided by the NSA's international surveillance apparatus.

James Clapper lies to senate intelligence committee and is outed only days later. On March 13th the statue of limitations runs out on prosecuting this crime.

This data is misused and no one is punished, even for the overtly blatant crimes.

This is specious, and exposes deep naiveté about the law as well as protocol at hearings. The director was put into the position of either lying to Congress or disclosing state secrets. Insofar as the law is concerned, exposing state secrets is a far worse offense. That's just the way it works, and if you don't like it, this particular instance isn't the moment to get into a pissing contest about what public policies you don't like, and all the dumb secrets the government keeps from us, but insists we keep on paying for. You should have been more proactive a long time before this, because this moment was being set up over a decade before it happened in public.

Clapper lying is an inevitable outcome of a hyper-survellience state, which is an inevitable outcome of a servile and paranoid society. The senator should not have asked the question in an open session if the idea was to get an honest answer. If you're a senator on the intel committee, you ask this sort of question in an open session if you're trying to make a public case that we have too many secrets.

And that's exactly what that whole sequence exposes, but per usual, someone from the ignorant mass wants to hang a single person out to dry for the decisions society has made.

Ignorant? You mean like the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is supposed to have classified oversight of America's spy agencies?

Maybe you should bone up on the details yourself, before slandering others as ignorant. Never mind Clapper could have simply refused to answer the question. But yes, please continue to cover for spies dodging their legal responsibility to comply with full Congressional oversight.

Sure, that's sort of what I meant in terms of openness. I don't expect them to leak their secrets in some public memorandum, but I expect them to be fully transparent with the representatives that we elect. However, the question is--are the representatives doing the best job representing us given this sensitive information they're privy to? Who's to say the NSA isn't asking, "just write that we're doing well in this report, its for the better of this country long term." And how do we catch/stop this?

This may be the most extreme version of the principle-agent problem.

Without leaking or sharing at least some information, it's impossible for the public to hold them accountable. This seems like a fundamental impossibility; not just a matter of the 'wrong' people being privy to the same secrets. For one reason, there's no way we can know if our representatives are even privy to all the information to which they're entitled.

Hell, even with a lot of information being leaked it still seems basically impossible to hold them accountable!

The HPSCI and SSCI do seem like reasonable checks. Ron Wyden especially has a good track record of calling out things he sees as problematic.

Another option is, in addition to trustworthy elected officials, you can have some sort of independent oversight that isn't partisan and is independent of whoever is in charge of the executive. The UK has something like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Reviewer_of_Terror...

That'd work in an ideal world, not here. In a 2 party system which are increasingly polarizing you'd have the pressure to stick to the party line.

Even in our current world, some issues' importance outweighs sticking to the party line. Luckily, we have more than two parties to vote for, so it's not quite as black and white as that.

>Luckily, we have more than two parties to vote for

Not to most americans--especially when it comes time to vote.

There's a real catch-22: the multiple other parties we (in the US) are capable of voting for will never have a chance at winning if we don't treat them as real alternatives to the entrenched two.

There's a reason both D's and R's repeat the lines "voting for a third party is a wasted vote" and play the polarizing "if you vote third party, you're voting for <opposite party>" card each election season. It may be partially true at the time, but also implies there are only two parties that can actually win -- which is something that can easily change, especially as D's and R's both move further towards the end of their respective spectrums.

I think the key is to vote third (alternative?) party in smaller elections (mayor, state senate), and then work up.

Voting third party for congress is mostly a waste of time for now, and it doesn't seem likely that we're going to see a massive enough shift in voter participation to change that all in one go, but I think with enough effort to build up non-D/R party support at the local level that could change a lot faster than most people think.

I'm less optimistic about the presidency, really. I doubt the reigning parties will let that slip out of their hands.

I expect the oversight they are subject to that is also privy to their private actions to hold them to it. I'm curious about what all they do, but at best all I could do is complain on social media about it (which some people actually think is the best approach here). I mean, what else can someone actually do?

There can easily be honesty and integrity without openness to everyone.

You'd expect them to be open and honest to the officials who are managing and reviewing them, but opaque and occasionally intentionally misleading to the wider general public.

Ideally congress would provide oversight. Unfortunately in today's world members of congress seem to be ok with the continued overreach of surveillance.

Isn't congress the set of people who are literally given the right (and responsibility) to define, by passing laws, what is ok and what's not? If they consider that it's ok, then it's ok; that's how the democratically elected representatives have decided.

>However they damn well better submit to oversight

James Clapper lied to the Senate intelligence committee about the existence of NSA bulk data collection. Infuriating.

I'm normally not in the business of defending government agencies but wasn't that interview done in an open forum? Perhaps he would have been more honest if the information wasn't going to be immediately reported on in the media.

He was testifying in front of Congress. Perjury is what he did. He later waffled about not being able to answer truthfully because of the surveillance being classified - yet he answered.

I'm legitimately curious here: Is it possible that he submitted additional testimony after the fact to the committee that he was testifying before? Or discussed the issue in a closed setting where classified material could be discussed?

I'm wondering the same thing. It seems to me that people who have classified information that shouldn't be released to the public shouldn't be put in a position to have to lie about it under oath.

How do you know they are acting with integrity without them being honest or open? It looks like a free ticket to do whatever they like and play the "trust us to be defending national interests" card whenever they see fit.

That's the importance of a free press. If they are violating our constitutional rights, the press should (ethically) be reporting on those violations. See: Edward Snowden.

Now, it is our representatives jobs to protect whistle blowers like Snowden, and unfortunately the general public either doesn't care, or doesn't want to take the time to truly understand what it means to have our privacy violated.

This is correct. Honesty would entail being honest with congress or with those who have been authorized to have appropriate clearance. So removing it as a core value reveals that the agency views its mission as having situations where it would reasonably veer away from such honesty.

From the NSA, and my admittedly-limited understanding of their duties, I'd expect honesty but not full openness. I'd rather you never tell me anything than be mislead.

It's a trust thing. Lying might boost trust temporarily but when I realize it's a lie, it's gonna be lower than before.

> However they damn well better submit to oversight and respect my constitutional rights as a citizen.

And which watchdog is ensuring this exactly? hint: It's not the politicians...

That argument works better for openness than honesty. How often do they need to outright lie to citizens to protect national security?

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