Hacker News Reader

Comment by volkk | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Not necessarily disagreeing but: facts? numbers? source?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com