NSA says warrantless searches of Americans’ data rose in 2018 | Hacker News Reader

NSA says warrantless searches of Americans’ data rose in 2018

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162 points0xmohit77 comments

If the NSA were a noble creature, we could rest easy.

There is no nobility in our governments though. No grace. They'll often trade data, up and down, with local governments, and the local governments can benefit from that federal warrantless data.

When the state of Arizona sweeps up all the non-licensed manicurists in Phoenix, and you're wondering "How the hell did Sheriff Billy Bob know about all these people..."

When you hear that really bad people will only be the targets of 4th amendment violations, don't be naive. Don't believe a word of it. And don't forget that government finds low hanging fruit absolutely delicious. "Look at what we got done." -says some random bureaucrat. While collecting some of the fattest pensions this side of the industrial revolution.

Truth, eloquently said.

You had me at “fattest pensions this side of the industrial revolution” lol

“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.”

It's all about establishing trust. These faceless entities will never make a public display of their egregious misuse of private information, so citizens will continue to hand over information that they wouldn't dream of personally giving to a stranger.

Warrantless searches will continue to rise, as will the other forms of surveillance, data collection, etc. as long as we let it happen. As long as most people don't really understand the technology, and it's implications, the government will continue to accrue mass troves of data, then lose the data in breaches.

Not many people I know would trust the government enough to let them do what they're doing if they truly understood. I think by the time we - as a society - realize all of the the implications, it will be much too late.

In terms of risk / benefit, this is a no-brainer. We couldn't possibly ever gain enough to outweigh the risks associated with having such a massive collection of intimate data.

>As long as most people don't really understand the technology, and it's implications, the government will continue to accrue mass troves of data, then lose the data in breaches.

Why are you only concerned about the government accruing mass troves of data, then losing them in breaches?

>In terms of risk / benefit, this is a no-brainer. We couldn't possibly ever gain enough to outweigh the risks associated with having such a massive collection of intimate data.

While I'm inclined to agree, there are many people who happily give up the most intimate details of their lives for extremely small conveniences.

I think it's biological. Herding creatures have to have the majority of the population be highly maleable to the influence of the pack leader(s).

This means that with the majority of the population, reason, thinking and ideas just don't penetrate well. It's all about going along and getting along. Ideas can only be considered if group think is rejected.

How ridiculously patronizing. Could it be that privacy arguments flogged to death on HN don't connect to the reality of the majority of people? Or that the arguments are not being expressed in an relatable or understandable way? Or that they share different values than you? No, it's the children who are wrong. I'm sure it's just group-think that blinds them to your brilliant ideas.

Not my ideas. Ideas in general. I have noted that most people don't like ideas and aren't capable of dealing with them without getting really emotional. But my personal observation is backed by data. In the Milgram experiments, 65% of people will apply a deadly shock to someone who is agonizing just because an authority told them so.

So I think it's safe to say that given we are herd animals, 65% just want to go along and get along. If this subset of the population don't care about people literally agonizing and killed without reason, what chance does privacy stand?

I'm hardly a bastion of uniqueness by being part of the 35% who isn't semi-drone-ish in following authority.

Interesting that the idea I brought wasn't addressed, though you did take the time to try and attack my character. Oh, and put words in my mouth by implying it is MY ideas that should be considered, when I never mentioned such a thing.

Anyway, even if your cartoonish depiction of my perspective were true, maybe you could be so kind as to inform this horrible patronizing person why his though process is wrong?

I didn't mean to imply the ideas are specifically yours (I can't edit my comment unfortunately), but I'm not really sure how that would be an attack on your character anyway.

This response misses the point though. I don't need to dispute the Milgram experiment[1] or vague claims that "65% of people just want to go along" to attack this "biological" explanation as patronizing, lazy and self serving. In this world and age awash with so many ideas of all kinds, hard-fought and won by people who didn't just idly speculate that their ideas were too brilliant for others to understand, it's a poor excuse to offer this up as an explanation. I can say this about anything. It doesn't change or reveal anything except some cherry picked numbers that vaguely imply the dog ate your homework without convincing anyone else that you did your homework in the first place (and I mean "your homework" in the general sense, not targeted at you or implying that the homework was your duty).

[1] although you should be more skeptical of its conclusions https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/rethinkin...

Ok, so now I'm not just patronizing, I'm lazy and self serving.

Trying to understand your post, the best I could make out, is that 'I shouldn't use these experiments as a justification to not spread my own good ideas or spread the good ideas of other people... or 'you in the general sense' to mean other people spreading other peoples ideas'.

Is this correct? Like, is this the basis for your rebuttal? If not, what is? I'm trying to un package your point, which seems muddled.

BTW, you didn't imply, you said it directly:

> your brilliant ideas

> didn't mean to imply the ideas are specifically yours

That type of conversation reminds me of a narcissist boss I had. Whenever he was in the wrong, he couldn't admit he was wrong. So when in such a position (we all are there sometimes), he would explain that 'he never meant to imply what he said, he meant what everyone else was saying that was the contrary of what his words meant by a dictionary definition' It was a mind trip dealing with him and his mental gymnastics.

The generic "you" is a real thing [1]. I've tried to clarify this because my stated intention is to attack the "biological" explanation as patronizing, lazy, and self-serving, not you as a whole person.

I can't stop you from taking things all of my words personally, I can only offer more words to say that I was speaking in a non-targeted way. I don't think it's helpful for us to continue without agreeing on this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you

Don't be nice 1, it is the silly 2 who manage to gaily 3 find truth, even if in senile4 maturity. I'd rather have naughty 5 in my bank, than get a myriad 6 of dollars per month and have to deal with people splitting hairs. My wife may be a spinster 7 who sells clue 8, but in her role as hussy 9, she has taught me never to fathom 10 someone who isn't awful 11.

1 - Meaning dumb, see definition 5 at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nice

2 - Meaning blessed, see adjective defnition 2 at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/silly

3 - Meaning happy

4 - Meaning elder without any pejorative connotation.

5 - Meaning zero

6 - Meaning 10,000 exactly.

7 - Someone who spins yarn, not related to sexuality

8 - A ball of yarn.

9 - Meaning mistress/master of the house, nothing related to sexuality

10 - Meaning hug, embrace with both arms

*11 - Worthy of awe.

Most people don’t WANT to understand. If you try explaining it to them they just plain don’t want to hear it; it’s not that they are too stupid. Sure there are those people also; most just want to bury their heads in the sand.

I think you aren't considering the fact that in the Milgram experiments, 65% of people will apply a deadly shock to someone who is agonizing just because an authority told them so.

That would imply there has never been progress on social and government overreach issues ever.

That is clearly false.

To me, I'm not sure how 65% followers vs 35% free-er thinkers means progress can't be made.

It's just acknowledging the reality in the difficulty of change.

I could be missing something though.

You might want to consider not relying on Milgram to make your point, what with the replication crisis taking out about 2/3rds of psychological research as deeply flawed, and Milgram and the various replications, have not escaped criticism.

I only quote it because some people can't use observation data to understand the world. They rely on the authority of science to prove it to them.

Way before Milgram it was known: jails, concentration camps, humanity is rife with stories of atrocities. And of a significant percentage of the population participating.

Government collection (especially under this program) is a tiny drop in the ocean compared to commercial data collection by tech companies. And the government programs, unlike the private sector ones, operate within a framework of laws, regulations, and ultimate accountability.

I agree with your sentiment, but the US government is a bit player here compared to private industry.

Tech companies didn't murder 100+ million of their own customers in the last century alone. It took governments to do that.

And as for "accountabilty," I think we've seen how far that goes over the last year or so.

The unaccountable government is going to hold these coporate monstrosities accountable? Dream on... what we need beyond the necessary political reform are companies with products that make bulk data collection impossible. In essence, “the cloud” needs to be rolled back and R&D should be invested in making it simple for Grandma to own and control her digital destiny

The weird part to me is that the US Intelligence Community is using Tumblr for communicating these reports to the public.

... for the reasons of national security, of course.

It seems to be part of a larger PR effort to appear socially acceptable and relatable in a post-Snowden world.

Now imagine being an angsty teenager looking for harry potter erotic fanfic and stumbling onto the NSA's director tumblr.

They 're onto us, you 'll think in a flash of paranoia. As if a swat team is in your house.

Did anyone expect it to do anything but rise? They have power and they want more. Pick up that can citizen.

Has there been a single incident where the NSA stopped any terrorist attacks, mass shootings etc? There is SO much data that its entirely possible the NSA can't screen everything thus things slip though. This is still a clear violation of the 4th amendment imho.

I'm skeptical of the image against terrorists being just a facade. I theorize the massive data collection is for studying psychological patterns in society.

I, too, am skeptical. I theorize that the massive data collection is for control purposes. But watch out - the first people to come under surveillance are those who object to surveillance.

More seriously, if you google "jane harmon alberto gonzalez" you'll find a nice, complicated scandal from GW Bush years that never got the play it should have. Sure, Representative Harmon seems to have done some things wrong, but the real issue is "...Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez later quashed a DOJ investigation into this incident in order to secure Harman’s support for the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program."

That's right, the Attorney General of the US might have (probably did) blackmail a US Representative, using surveillance data. We're all accustomed to autocratic executive branches now, but that's a bridge too far, if you ask me.

I have no objection to surveillance if people are open about it and the information is accessible if reasonably needed. I honestly would rather live in a world that had cameras everywhere, including the rooms of my apartment and making victims actually have an opportunity to receive justice instead of the reality we live in today. Of course what I'm writing will be attacked because such a system is hard to design but it's not impossible and if it was made it could make it so the abused no longer be abused. Anyway I'm now in Canada because United States is only where the financially privileged get justice & healthcare.

When I googled "jane harmon alberto gonzalez" I found a lot of blog spam linking to Jeff Stein's original reporting on that, but Stein's article 404ed.

Here it is, for the interested: http://web.archive.org/web/20090421090444/http://static.cqpo...

Yes, according to the NSA. Not surprisingly they're usually pretty coy about the details, which makes it hard to independently verify some of their claims. for example:

NSA, over a two-year period, used Section 702 to develop a robust body of knowledge about the personal network of an individual providing support to a leading terrorist in Iraq and Syria. This "leading terrorist" practiced strict operational security, and thus it was necessary to study the target by identifying key operatives throughout his network to understand not only the plans and intentions of the terrorist leader, but also to attempt to track his movements. Section 702 collection provided the necessary information for tactical teams to conduct a successful military operation, removing the terrorist from the battlefield. This information was critical to the discovery and disruption of this threat to the U.S. and its allies.

>an individual providing support to a leading terrorist in Iraq and Syria

That's a pretty weak outcome for such egregious privacy violations.

If they'd "stopped 17 plots to kill 100 or more Americans" then maybe I'd concede that the program is effective (though still immoral IMO).

Allegedly, the FBI just thwarted a planned bombing in LA by an Army veteran. [1]

Obviously all the operation details of how they found this guy are not disclosed, but there does appear to be undercover agents involved.

There have been cases in the past where the FBI undercover agent has been a little too instrumental in developing the plan for the alleged attack, but it doesn’t appear that is the case in this instance.

I would not be surprised if some sort of mass surveillance was instrumental in identifying / risk scoring this guy’s posting and flagging him for closer investigation.

Not at all a supporter of these programs in general, but I wanted to try to answer your question.

[1] - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/salvadorhernandez/calif...

Be REALLY careful when you look at these “FBI FOILED PLOT” stories. It’s typically some lunatic they approached, and then sold fake materials to. They are experts at staying JUST on the right side of the entrapment line, legally speaking.

There is a well known sentiment that the craziest guy you’ll find if you are looking for trouble is the FBI agent.

There are documented instances of FBI agents selling fake bombs or drugs to CIA or DEA guys or vice versa.

It’s works for them because they get to pay themselves on the back for stopping the guy they helped radicalize who never would have had means on his own.

Meanwhile the sentient maniacs who realize they're a threat to society often turn themselves in and get turned away only to go on to commit senseless massacres of innocent citizens.

Most of these FBI foiled plots are done with open source intelligence and reports from family and friends about specific individuals or they are posting all over Facebook about it. When you read the fine details, in my experience anecdotally almost none of the recently publicized foiled plots appear to be because of NSA intelligence. So the question remains what the NSA data is being used for?

I just used that example because it was one of the more concrete ones. The NSA has a list here[1] but a lot of the outcomes are more nebulous.

[1]: https://www.nsa.gov/News-Features/News-Stories/Article-View/...

It's likely that the massive surveillance infrastructure isn't for looking for certain words but to link individuals together and build graphs to explore relationships. During a wiretapped call that investigators are listening in on, a name in dropped. That name could then be run through the NSA's databases to produce not just how the target knows the new person but who that new person knows. There could be an entire terror cell operating totally unknown but unless something links one of the members to terrorism, all of those guys could just be a bowling club for all anyone knows.

The more secret an agency is, the less likely you'll hear about the great achievements they've done for your country on the short term. On the long term, it might end up declassified. That's the conundrum of secret services. The public cannot possibly assess their performance.

As for the needle in a haystack point. Bill Binney architected a system which was targeted. The NSA rejected it...

>The public cannot possibly assess their performance.

Respectfully, that's not true. Secret programs can still be judged on their inputs and outputs: eg "we spent $50B and averted 17 attacks, saving potentially 15,000 lives and $500B in economic damage." What possible information can that give an adversary?

I consider it more like the defense of American football. A good defense is good. They could not allow the opposing offense to score any points all game. What should the defense claim? "We prevented 21 points from being scored!" No. They have no idea how many points they prevented.

NSA is a thankless organization. You don't know all the things they've done well, and they get blamed whenever anything bad happens.

It's pretty straightforward to quantify how good a football defensive team is.

> We had 5 sacks, 3 interceptions, and limited the opposing offense to 200yards gained.

Is obviously better than

> We had 0 sacks, 0 interceptions, and the opposing offense took 400 yards.

Even if in both games the opposing offense scored the same number of points.

I agree, it's not a perfect analogy. I think the point stands.

I think his point is it possible to quantify what the NSA does and not reveal anything classified. Similar to how you can quantify how good a football defense is even if you don't know every play, or anything about their strategies, who is on there team, how many players were on the field.

Are there many/any government agencies that quantify things to validate their existence?

Schools have tests. I get a newsletter from my local government a few times a year that says how they are spending my money, especially if they are pushing for a levy. Any program that is in jeopardy of losing funding publishing some sort of "this is why you should keep giving us money" like NASA or an arts program. For example: https://www.nasa.gov/news/budget/index.html

I think the point is, it's your/our fucking money, and they should be.

We're here arguing about whether the defense is any good at their job, but nobody's asking about the long-term CTE caused by the team playing the game in the first place.

If we as a populous were good coaches/managers, we'd be using the players to protect our house, and alert us to better ways to secure it.

>"we spent $50B and averted 17 attacks, saving potentially 15,000 lives and $500B in economic damage." What possible information can that give an adversary?

The average operation cost of 17 successfully averted attacks is $2.94B.

More to the point of holding secret organizations accountable, though, is the fact that you do not know if that is information or misinformation.

They probably don't want to publicize their methods, and they might not have to due to parallel construction -- we may never know what they've stopped. There's not a lot of oversight here: they're also spying on Congress and civil servants and every time a terrorist attack or mass shooting happens, they get more money and more power whether they've stopped any other attacks or not.

In the unlikely event that someone told them to stop because the 4th amendment was violated, they would just have someone in an intelligence-sharing agreement like Five Eyes get the same data and send it over.

This isn't the right question to ask, as it presumes that efficacy would be a justification. Totalitarianism is never okay, regardless of its effect on crime.

people who benefit financially or politically might disagree.

Yes, obviously someone financially or politically benefiting from totalitarianism would disagree, as they want it to continue to the detriment of everyone else. Which is why it's important to not give them any possible ammunition like "hey it did actually stop this one rando, so it's really for your own good".

> This is still a clear violation of the 4th amendment imho.

How? The Fourth Amendment says nothing about collecting the communications of specific non-Americans living outside the US that are believed to have foreign intelligence value (Section 702 collection). Searching that data with queries for specific US people under investigation is at worst a gray area.

Regarding data collection, it's hard to make people care. It's like smoking or (some) drugs; as long as the effect is gradual and not immediate, people won't care.

It takes someone who values freedom and privacy, and/or tech savvy folks that understand the implications of data collection, to actually care.

It's unfortunate, but most are not even willing to take 15 minutes and re-configure the settings on their phone to increase privacy. For more people to care, I think it'll have to affect them directly, in a negative and embarrassing way.

I thought the source link was a joke at first... why is US Intelligence publishing releases on Tumblr, of all places?

>Additional public information on national security authorities is available at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s website, www.dni.gov, the Intelligence Community’s public website, www.intel.gov, and ODNI’s public Tumblr site, IC on the Record at IContheRecord.tumblr.com.

I'd vote for the NSA to be disbanded, all personnel fired, all equipment destroyed. Would anyone else vote for that?

regarding the stuff they already have: doesn't whatever they have have huge historical value? it could be the difference between being a lost civilization and being well-preserved.

I'm not saying it should continue but if I could vote between destroying it or putting it on mars in a time capsule to be opened in 1,000 years I'd probably choose the latter. (not saying collection should continue.)

humanity has zero qualms about reading historical letters among famous people but these days it's all digital so we would be a lost civilization otherwise.

I don't know if it has access to this stuff but if it does wouldn't it be better to put it somewhere for the future? Though the way we have no qualms about opening Pharaohs' tombs in Egypt presumably we can't count on our direct descendents not opening it early either. I don't know how anyone can make a legit time capsule.

what do you think? better to destroy all that data?

If a government agency openly announced, today, that they would be indiscriminately collecting phone and internet data from Americans for the express purpose of putting it in a time capsule to be opened in 1,000 years, would you be pleased?

(FWIW, I would not.)

No. (And I think it should stop, if it's happening.)

If a trove of private correspondence is found from an ancient civilization, that was clearly not meant for disseminatuon but intercepted unlawfully, do you think we should destroy it?

I think it's okay to answer this question in the negative. But an argument could be made that people should have a right to privacy unbroken even by long posterity.

What do you think of that question?

If it's happening...?

I stopped reading. Please educate yourself on the NSA's faculties and budget.

In that case, another agency would simply pick up the slack.

I'll propose an alternative idea. Repurpose the NSA towards hardening communications infrastructure in terms of both reliability and anonymity. Use them to help test software for vulnerabilities or even design better software.

At this rate, realistically, how many years until they (and their brethren) are the power behind the throne. In a surveillance era, some version of GoogleCIA will have the ability to move or alter elections in any way they like. It's always for the best reasons of course.

> In a surveillance era, some version of GoogleCIA will have the ability to move or alter elections in any way they like. It's always for the best reasons of course.

I think we're past that tipping point already.

I'm thinking more in the form of actually driving all policy rather than merely placing a desired candidate in office.

For all I know, maybe we've already hit that point.

Even the Soviets managed a rough balance between party/army/intelligence services, but modern surveillance and parsing have some serious mojo.

I guess it'll become more obvious once the CIA Directorship becomes an inherited position.

I actually like your idea much more! Due to the black box nature of the NSA though, I don't think we could verify that they had actually repurposed to that end. I imagine that the NSA would create a new group that would occasionally make improvements (very much like SE Linux) and highly publicize it, while continuing operations status quo.

No, and I strongly suspect most people would vote against that. Hence why it exists.

Unfortunately, the people don't get a say in this. At all. We vote on politicians, not policies.

In 2015, Pew polled people on this and there was a near 50/50 split on support for telephonic surveillance, and slightly more Americans believed that security was more important than civil liberties and that NSA hadn't gone far enough to protect them. If the people had a direct say in policy, there's little evidence they'd go the way you want them to.

"was a near 50/50 split on support for telephonic surveillance"

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/29/what-americ...

> A majority of Americans (54%) disapprove of the U.S. government’s collection of telephone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts, while 42% approve of the program.

There was a gap of twelve percentage points between approval and disapproval.

Thank you for the research! I wouldn't necessarily compare a poll to a vote, but it's a good starting point.

There's always the problem of information. I'm certain that basically no citizens know enough about the NSA, the surveillance capabilities and extent of data collection etc to make an informed decision. So they're not really polling what people believe - they're polling what the media companies think which people get their information from.

All the personnel would go work for a private company doing the same thing whether in the US or for someone other than the US. $$$ talks.

[0]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-spying-raven-specialr...

There are entities that are much more concerning. The NSA's PR attempts are pale in comparison to the real players in the social engineering field.

I bet Michael Hastings had something to say about it.

Are they proud of it? What is going on? They used to lie about this stuff. Maybe they are trying to pin this law on Trump? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/way-nsa-uses-section-7...

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