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Comment by kopo | Hacker News Reader

Who cares?

They were busy snoring when it came to 9/11. Fake WMDs, never ending wars against goat herders, snowden, not to mention 13 Russians who apparently swung an election.

If someone is busy triggering mail bombers and lunatic shooters just by targeting and upvoting their posts on social media what's all this sci-fi stuff good for? The more complex the world gets the more pointless all this superficial gimmickry looks.

Just look at the budgets thrown at these agencies. Its frankly sickening.

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>If someone is busy triggering mail bombers and lunatic shooters just by targeting and upvoting their posts on social media what's all this sci-fi stuff good for?

Your first assumption is that any of those actions were against the ethos of the ones in charge of this technology. They aren't there to stop the bad guys. If anything, the bad guys winning some of the time helps provide public support for the endeavors of those behind this technology. Consider how the people in charge of this technology either gain or lose from the actions of the people you want monitored, compared to what they have to gain or lose from the actions of others who they could use this technology to monitor.

In my personal view, MLK Jr., after his turn to focus on the plight of the poor, is far more a schema of the intended target of this type of technology than James Earl Ray.

> They were busy snoring when it came to 9/11.

They weren't snoring of course, there's no shortage of evidence showing foreknowledge about 9/11 that was consciously ignored by the Bush administration and the intelligence services prior to the event and then (only half-successfully) covered up afterwards.

Hindsight bias at its finest.

The real issue was identified in the first few years after 9/11 - disparate patchwork of teams overzealously enforcing moats around their intel/data.

https://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf

Actually read the report, or at least skim it starting from page 254. What you're saying is just not true.

Since we're speculating about spies, politics and secrecy to begin with, is it really in the spirit of the game to just trust a report published by the government that says the government was doing things right?

I'm not playing a game.

Specifically, which part(s) of the report are you refuting? Please provide pages and paragraphs #s or quotes.

How's he going to refute anything specific without himself being privy to government knowledge?

>>consciously ignored by the Bush administration and the intelligence services prior to the event and then

No doubt someone is screaming that yesterday an attack was going to go on in X country.

And "consciously" is a very loaded word.

It's too bad people were arguing with your point about 9/11 as if they could prove that was invalid, it would completely invalidate your entire argument.

The most recent example of your argument was the death of Jamal Khashoggi. The Washington Post reported that the CIA had advance notice of the attack.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/saudis-lay-in-wait-for-...

The problem of course is because of the secret nature of their budgets, spending, successes, and failures, it's hard to know how good or bad they are for the country.

But there comes a time when we get real victories, even if they aren't revealed for decades. And the victories that happened this decade, may not be revealed for another two or more decades from now.

Monitoring the blank landscape for signals of malevolence is one thing. But targeting a specific landscape for an attack is another thing entirely. In other words, it is easier to cause an action of attack than it is to monitor, forewarn or prevent somebody else's attack.

The possibilities are now open to detect presence behind doors or to shoot people deeply embedded in buildings.

The incentives aren't there to perform better. Even after all these failures you mentioned, they haven't really been punished in any significant way whatsoever, so why improve?

Correct. The incentives are only truly there, generally, as an organization, for intelligence agencies to do what retains them capabilities, and their budget.

And when every department is granularly information insulated, it's easy for an individual to get caught in a task that serves the above while not even realizing.

I see, well the reason you should care has nothing to do with their mandate.

What they have is a monopoly on hacking without consequence, and infinite budget to explore every vector in hardware, software and physics to exploit, for no particular reason for no discernable threat aside from "that agency over there is also doing it, maybe", and assuming that is a threat.

Well, looks like everything is functioning as expected. You get the drama that you are obliged to throw money at.

> They were busy snoring when it came to 9/11. Fake WMDs, never ending wars against goat herders, snowden, not to mention 13 Russians who apparently swung an election.

Ouch. All apparently true, but ouch.

This kind of things won't change until major national security incidents cause budget cuts, not budget increases. It should be like the private sector. When you repeatedly F things up, you make less and not more.

The counter-argument will be "but you're hobbling our intelligence!" Okay, then create a competing intelligence agency to the CIA/NSA/etc. and give the budget to the one producing results.

> They were busy snoring when it came to 9/11.

The replies to this post completely dismiss the elephant in the room.

It seems that YouTube's censorship algorithms finally stopped blocking it: search YouTube for the 5 hour long DVD series "The New Pearl Harbor ~ full" (dWUzfJGmt5U if it becomes unlisted)

Busy snoring? They were prosecuting Bill Clinton. So he was very distracted. The kill order for Bin Laden just sat on his desk.

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