Hacker News Reader

Comment by sarcasmatwork | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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/...

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".

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 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.

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.

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...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com