Disputed NSA Phone Program Is Shut Down, Aide Says

Not sure about the down boats here. The program caught and/or stopped precisely 0 (ZERO) terrorists. It also failed to harvest any data regarding "Muh Russians".

It and many other NSA projects are about as effective as the TSA.

Yeah, I really hope we're getting beyond the terrorist fear mongering. It only existed as a way to win elections and funnel money away from tax payers to corporations.

“What we learned from the 2016 election is that all the bad things we were told NSA was doing, Facebook was actually the one doing them.”

There are three kinds of groups collecting data on individuals today:

- Democratic governments

- Autocratic governments

- Surveillance-capitalism private firms

Of those three groups, only democratic countries have rules and laws in place to protect individuals. NSA has strict rules about data collection on US citizens; autocratic countries and Facebook do not. NSA has caught a few employees looking at data they should not have; those employees were disciplined.

I’d much rather have agencies of a democratic government doing this than anyone else. I’m a US citizen, but I trust the U.K., Canada, etc to do this right.

I suppose that's a bit better but I was kind of objecting to the NYT and other large papers habit of sourcing these anonymous comments from government officials. This is not a one-off thing. It's their status quo.

The question is does USA see Russia, China, Iran as its peers and want to be in their league or not.

It is okay to be a despotic regime as long as you also face the risks that come along with it. USA does not face such risks and hence it can not be okay to compare it with say Russia.

I am reminded of the following (obviously fictional) story where Ronald Regan and Gorbachev wondered who had the most loyal soldiers. Ronald Regan asked one of his bodyguard to shoot himself to show his loyalty. The bodyguard laughed and asked Regan to fuck off. Gorbachev asked the same of his bodyguard who promptly shot himself to death. Regan was very surprised and asked Gorbachev as to how come his bodyguard was so loyal. Gorbachev said, he was protecting his family by killing himself.

I do not think China, Russia or Saudi Barbaria are worthwhile bechmarks for USA. Those countries have achieved little and will continue to achieve little.

It's not really a needle in haystack problem. If you record every moment of all your citizens. You can build a calendar application where you enter the name of the person and go through all the moments in question throughout the days of curiosity. Specifically when that person is under suspicions of some criminal involvement. I feel sorry for china because I can only imagine how much more data besides just phone calls are collected from citizens unaware.

Conversely, their vacuum everything approach could have landed them additional evidence against Russian hackers.

Let us hope that you are correct. We would still need to fortify laws against data collection that is fiercely enforced (although already being a requirement in many constitutions in the western sphere). That would require oversight with severe consequences for any program breaking the rules. Personal consequences up the chain. Intelligence agencies have morphed to petty criminal gangs. Even if you can easily argue that they have been criminal before...

I think a lot of people at the NSA are relieved to not be doing this anymore. These programs were started post-9/11 when we had no idea whether they would be effective but we felt like we needed to try them or at least try something because they might be the silver bullet that prevents another 9/11. People knew they were constitutionally dark gray and fundamentally un-American on day 1 but they went along because it might help. Many of the more senior people in the early 2000s were old enough to recall the Hoover era and everything that came to light after it. Now that we've proven bulk collection doesn't work we can finally put it to rest. With the increasing popularity of encryption it was getting long in the tooth anyway.

I also think that the established political parties are realizing how much power truly does lie in the executive branch and how long four years really is. While the current example being used to teach these lessons may be highly repugnant to the current political elite (on both sides) he is not doing anything that cannot be undone relatively easily.

The bigger the program the shorter the time it will stay secret, a nation scale metadata collection program is necessarily big. Congress will find out about it eventually at which point they will not be happy (Feinstein and a few die hard authoritarians excepted) because said program is all downside and no upside (as proven by PRISM's track record).

Nobody in Washington wants a time bomb like the calendar use case you described sitting around lest some future far left or right president use it in a manner that inadvertently starts a civil war.

That said, I also fully expect that they've moved on to some equally nefarious shit without telling us because that's what intelligence agencies do.