Comment by Jerry2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jerry2 | Hacker News Reader

One program is shutting down (according to who knows whom) but that doesn't mean that other programs are doing the exact same thing. NY Times is again acting as a limited hangout [0] for various spy agencies.

One of the things we learned from Congressional hearings (from James Clapper and others) and from whistleblowers like William Binney and Snowden is that these intelligence agencies change the meaning of words. Things like "collection" and "analysis" don't mean what you think they mean. When they say "we don't collect X" that just means they don't collect X under the program they're testifying about. If there are other programs, they won't tell you about those or will only testify in secret. Sometimes they outright lie about things too as we found out from Clapper's testimony.

Anyway, don't believe a word they say. This data is way too valuable to be abandoned. If not the NSA, someone else will be collecting it, analyzing it and disseminating it through some database within the IC.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout

" If not the NSA, someone else will be collecting it." Correct, that company in the private sector is called Palantir.

“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 don't necessarily trust governments to do the right thing right off the bat, but I do trust judges' ability to defang government overreach more than private corporation overreach.

Unfortunately this judicial review only seems to occur way, way after the fact

"parallel reconstruction" is illegal but still alive and well. The Fed intelligence doesn't care about the law too much.

They're shutting it down in the same way they shut down terrorists.

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.

I also believe the number is very low, but let's be fair: it's not clear that they would publish any terrorists they did catch, because then that reveals how they were caught, which terrorists can then use to adapt their tactics.

They have to give the politicians something to brag about so funding doesn't go down.

NSA is very effective for its actual purpose: transferring public assets to private hands. NSA employees either make their peace with that or they get destroyed. NSA treats whistleblowers at least as poorly as whistleblowers are treated anywhere else in the public segment of the military-industrial complex. Which is to say, very very poorly.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/22/how-pentagon...

https://www.rollcall.com/news/pentagon-whistleblowers-often-...

Do you expect to hear from NSA whistleblowers for which everything went fine?

As we see in Table 2.3 on page 56 of a GAO report to Congress [0], of the 1159 Pentagon whistleblower reprisal complaints submitted in 2H-FY18, 16% were "substantiated" and the rest were repurposed for toilet paper. I do not expect the unsupervised services to surpass the performance of the Pentagon in this area. I'm also not surprised that the official-stenography war media have not covered this report.

[0] https://media.defense.gov/2018/Dec/06/2002069859/-1/-1/1/SAR...

Do you have a source for this or is this speculation?

These programs are all about domestic law enforcement. (The same goes for ICE checkpoints inside the us borders).

In the case of TSA and ICE, they feed the prison system with more petty drug offenders.

NSA data is widely used for “alternate reconstruction”, where the NSA flags someone and then the police falsify evidence to make it seem to the courts as though the evidence was obtained legally.

Note that there’s no need to even lie about illegal surveillance that is outsourced to companies like Facebook and palintir, since the right to privacy only extends to government actions in the US (not government contractors).

Of course they stopped no terrorists, so I was joking that neither will they stop the program. Whether continued by other governmental efforts or if this one explicitly continues itself, the government has outright lied many, many times in the past, about a great many different things.

I still believe that there is some hidden reason for all the financial costs and overblown efforts at data-mining, beyond "terrorism" or plain-jane control. It's just too big, too widescale. It feels like one of those rare instances where reality is getting dangerously close to full-on science fantasy.

How do you know?

Do you seriously think that nobody has attempted to coordinate a major terrorist action since 2001?

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.

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