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Comment by kerkeslager | Hacker News Reader

So inform us. Present evidence for your opinion or keep your opinion to yourself.

Here's a decent article highlighting 4 attacks of the 50 they claim to have foiled since 2001. https://www.ibtimes.com/four-times-nsa-surveillance-programs...

> The first example was the case of Najibullah Zazi, who confessed to plotting to bomb the New York City subway system in 2009. Joyce confirmed that the NSA’s Internet surveillance program led officials to a suspect in Colorado who turned out to be Zazi. The FBI took the necessary legal steps to identify him and ultimately capture him, in concert with authorities in New York. Under Section 215's authority, Joyce said, the NSA was also able to nail down a “previously unknown [phone] number of one of the co-conspirators.”

> “Without the 702 tool, we would not have identified Najibullah Zazi,” Joyce said later in the hearing.

Okay, sounds pretty legit. His plea bargain was partly informed by threatening his parents[1], but it does sound like there was a lot of other evidence collected through traditional police methods.

> The second instance described was a thwarted plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange. Under Section 702's authority, the NSA monitored a known extremist in Yemen who was communicating with a man in Kansas City, Mo. This information led the FBI to Khalid Ouazzani, his co-conspirators and ultimately the plot to bomb the NYSE. Ouazzani ultimately confessed to sending money to al-Qaeda and was never convicted for the stock exchange plot.

Okay, so we... removed a small funding source of Al Queda? Maybe it's just me, but if I were trying to attack Al Queda's funding, I'd start with not having the CIA give them millions of dollars[2] before going the "surveil all Americans" route. For comparison, the CIA gave them $2 million in one payment[2], while Ouazzani gave them $23K[3]. The NSA yearly budget is ~$10 billion.[4] The NYC police budget was $5.6 billion in 2018[5] and they handled 295 homicide cases in 2018[6].

> The third instance cited by Joyce was the case of David Headley, an American in Chicago who aided the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks. The FBI had received a tip about his involvement in the attacks when the NSA’s 702 surveillance also identified Headley as involved in a plot to bomb a Danish newspaper office that had published cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed that were considered offensive by some Muslims. “Headley later confessed to personally conducting surveillance of the Danish newspaper office,” Joyce said.

So basically, this guy was already going to be arrested for the 2008 Mumbai Terrorist Attacks, but due to surveillance they were able to also charge him for... surveiling. The irony is staggering.

> Regarding the final case, Joyce testified that data collection under Section 215 helped uncover terrorist activity that the FBI had been unable to detect previously. In 2007, the FBI closed an investigation it had launched shortly after Sept. 11, when it could not connect the subject of the investigation to terrorist activity. Years later, under its Section 215-sanctioned metadata collection program, the NSA identified a phone number in San Diego that was in contact with a known terrorist overseas. The NSA’s discovery allowed the FBI to reopen the investigation and disrupt the terrorist activity. Joyce later confirmed that the activity involved providing financial support to a designated terrorist group overseas.

This could not possibly be more vague.

Ostensibly, since the source is the NSA's PR team, these were the best cases the NSA could come up with? This sounds like a strong argument that the money should be better spent on traditional law enforcement.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Najibullah_Zazi#Guilty_plea

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/world/asia/cia-funds-foun...

[3] https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/kansascity/press-releases/...

[4] https://threatpost.com/nsa-metadata-program-likely-not-cost-...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Police_Departmen...

[6] [Excel File Warning] https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/excel/analysis_an...

He didn't give any less evidence than OP.

I claim there isn't a teapot. You claim there is. Who has to provide evidence? What happens when one applies this to claims about an organization?

To explain the other response you received:

It's common knowledge that NSA dragnet surveillance recorded the phone calls and captured the metadata of almost every American for a few years, and probably still is. This, I would argue, we can agree upon without having to present evidence.

If you're going to argue that this violation of human rights was necessary, the burden of proof is on you to prove this extraordinary claim.

You are kidding right? The whole cold war?

Unfounded claims, calling someone incredibly uninformed and ignorant, with zero evidence to back up these admonitions, shouldn't be posted here. If you have a claim to post, back it up with some kind of evidence or data. No one should have to be called "kidding" when they call out a lack of any kind of data.

The person you’re responding to didn’t call anyone anything. Be sure to check usernames.

During the Cold War, the US government did a lot of things which were extraordinarily harmful to US Citizens and contributed nothing to fighting Soviet totalitarianism. Soviet totalitarianism was certainly a threat, but US repsonses to Soviet totalitarianism were often counterproductive. There's a strong argument to be made that the US government did more harm to US citizens during the Cold War than the Soviets ever did. I'd be open to hearing evidence that the NSA was an exception, but you certainly haven't presented any.

Simply trotting out old tired Russophobia doesn't prove that pervasive surveillance has been good for the American people, it just shows your own bias. You're turning a blind eye to the wrongs done by the US government, some of them much worse than pervasive surveillance.

> There's a strong argument to be made that the US government did more harm to US citizens during the Cold War than the Soviets ever did. I'd be open to hearing evidence that the NSA was an exception, but you certainly haven't presented any.

What harm do you claim the NSA did to Americans in that time? Their mandate is foreign surveillance, and while citizens do get caught in their net (especially with foreign contacts), it's not their focus.

I can think of a couple, but they seem relatively limited?

a) Surveillance revealing domestic crimes that were prosecuted through parallel construction.

b) American businesses benefiting from NSA intelligence gathering, through politicians passing along information.

While it happened after the end of the USSR, we know that the NSA contrived to get a crypto system they knew to be weak standardized. And that weakness was later leveraged by hackers in at least one case.

> What harm do you claim the NSA did to Americans in that time?

The GP did not say "NSA", but "US government". See for example:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

Correct, this is what I meant.

The whole thread was about the NSA's budget and mission, so I misunderstood your point. It appears you have no specific qualms with the NSA other than the fact they exist under the same government as the FBI/CIA?

No, I'm just shooting down the idea that simply saying the NSA was involved in fighting the cold war doesn't mean they're positive for US Citizens.

I haven't mentioned my qualms about the NSA up to this point, but since you asked: I object to spending $10.8 billion in 2013[1]. I object to the fact that they have so little oversight, the public had to find out what their funding is from a leak[1]. I object to the fact that this spending resulted in only 4 arrests they will tell us about over a period of years[2] which are all fairly questionable[3]. I object to their continued violation of the constitutional right to privacy of almost every American.[4] I object to them undermining encryption standards[5] which weakens the security of people and companies everywhere.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/30/us/politics/leaked-docume...

[2] https://www.ibtimes.com/four-times-nsa-surveillance-programs...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20944055

[4] https://www.eff.org/702-spying

[5] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nsa-nist-encrypti...

> No, I'm just shooting down the idea that simply saying the NSA was involved in fighting the cold war doesn't mean they're positive for US Citizens

is a big backtrack from

> There's a strong argument to be made that the US government did more harm to US citizens during the Cold War than the Soviets ever did

The second thing you quoted is part of my evidence for the first thing you quoted. It's not a backtrack at all.

Do you have an actual evidence-based opinion, or are you just trying to catch me in weird gotchas? I'm sure I've said something slightly incorrect you can track down, but that doesn't really negate the evidence I've linked.

> contributed nothing to fighting Soviet totalitarianism

I wouldn't say nothing. At the very least, they made sure that Russia wasn't planning to fire any nukes at us.

I probably could have worded that better--it's ambiguous. What I meant is that a lot of the things which the US government did were harmful to US Citizens, and a lot of those same things that the government did, contributed nothing to the fight against Soviet totalitarianism.

Many of the mkultra experiments are a good example: the US government drove a bunch of US citizens insane for projects which ultimately resulted in no useable weaponry.

My point being: simply waving your hands and saying "the cold war!" isn't a valid defense of US government organizations.

Ah, so the NSA was the reason the cold war ended as it did? Via what specific actions/events?

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