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Whenever I see such news and then look around at what they’ve been doing and continue to do (revealed sometimes in congressional hearings), it seems to me that the executive and the legislature are truly toothless in the face of these three-letter agencies. Nothing they say or put forth as law will be obeyed. So why even have laws then?

Then you also have top representatives from these agencies lying outright in public hearings with hardly a consequence. There ought to be criminal proceedings and punishments for this. A resignation here and there isn’t enough (one way they’d handle that is by joining the privacy sector and getting back into the game by proxy).

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They are not toothless, they put them in those positions of power and do so gladly.

Remember that Snowden always said he was ready to come back to the U.S and be trialled, as long as the trial wouldn't be a secret trial. Those who created the laws for those secret trial where not the CIA or the NSA, it was politician.

The same way they made it so that it is forbidden to talk about the programs of certain agencies, even for law maker, meaning they approve programs without debate, with only a few senator knowing what the program is even about.

They created those laws, not the NSA, not the CIA, they could choose as easily to remove them. But it is too useful for them. The NSA can create a massive surveillance network that serves them without having to ever disclose it to the public.

Trials are secret because they don't want to reveal further secrets. On the other hand you hear people saying: "If you are doing everything right, you have nothing to hide."

The difference is that in a democracy you should be responsible for the actions of government and you need to be able to audit governmental action, not the other way around.

I am surprised that they really have zero cases where mass surveillance helped. I would have thought they would make some up at least, but that got probably too hot.

Of course there is a massive amount of secret cases where it did help, but they just cannot tell you about...

It is a bad excuse that can be used to justify anything. Instead the case for secrecy needs justification.

If you have nothing to hide, it's only because there's nobody trying to hurt you right now.

Far as I understand the first director the FBI J. Edgar Hoover had blackmail on a lot of federal politicians. Which is why he left his position feet first. When Hoover died Nixon replaced him with someone with no previous ties to the agency.

The CIA has deep ties to the American upper classes. And probably serves their interests over the states. Or their own interests. Aldrich Ames was living well beyond is means for years. A good supposition is people at his level routinely trade intel to 'friendly' government an corporate interests.

Right. Look at the din over the Epstein stuff, due to covering/blackmailing/etc over the misbehavior by a small group.

Then imagine a single entity that has every domestic text, phone call, and email ever sent, searchable and indexed, on any politician, judge, or candidate. It's far, far, more power than merely spying on foreign powers.

The security services have to do some unpleasant stuff in order to attempt some control over people. Whats the oldest profession in the book, then ask yourself what is the second oldest profession in the book? Would that be blackmail?

> The CIA has deep ties to the American upper classes

That’s hardly unique to the US. Other nations’ intelligence agencies tend to attract the aristocracy, e.g. all the Oxbridge alum at MI6/GCHQ.

Joining the intelligence services was basically the way the British upper class avoided combat service in ww2

You can level a lot of shit at the British upper classes, but being war-shy isn’t one of them. Until about 50 years ago, the entirety of the officer corps was picked from the gentry, and it’s not _that_ different today. Junior officers are just as much cannon fodder as other ranks.

I'm pretty sure junior officers were actually one of the hardest hit sections of the Army in WW1 and WW2.

I read a book recently about a young (19!) year old tank commander in WW2 and he was told by his CO when arriving in Normandy that his life expectancy was 10 days.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tank-Action-Armoured-Commanders-194...

No, they actually serve the country and the government. This conspiracy theory has no basis. Ames was a double agent, not a great example.

Which part of the parent are you saying "has no basis"?

Where's the evidence the CIA serves the country and government? There's not a lot of evidence that it is effective at protecting the American people from anything.

There is a lot of evidence that the CIA is doing whatever it can to ensure that the %1 of American society get their way with the world, however. That's not the same as 'serving country and government', by any stretch of the imagination.

I don’t think there is any evidence that they are doing whatever they can to serve the 1%.

There is in fact a lot of evidence that they serve the country.

> They created those laws, not the NSA, not the CIA, they could choose as easily to remove them. But it is too useful for them.

This is true, but it's not the entire truth either. Most congressmen don't have access to the really sensitive intelligence that comes from these surveillance operations, so it can't be that useful to many of them.

A legislator's primary goal is to get reelected, and working to remove powerful operations like this deeply threaten a legislator's political viability during elections. Remember, there's an incredible amount of money changing hands in the military-industrial complex, and money plays a huge role in winning elections.

>Remember, there's an incredible amount of money changing hands in the military-industrial complex, and money plays a huge role in winning elections.

This, to me, is the heart of the issue. American politics are fundamentally corrupted by campaign financing

I don't know, I feel like

> A legislator's primary goal is to get reelected

is the more pressing problem to issue first. Is their "primary goal" not to legislate first? Pandering to the court of public opinion in order to secure re-election seems like it would also cause all sorts of conflicting incentives.

I respectfully disagree; we want them accountable to the public. The simplest way to have politicians accountable to public opinion (without violence) is by making them have to care about elections. That's the entire point of democracy.

The public are only given a reflection of the candidate and even that is mediated by the media. Why worry about being accountable when you can spin the truth to suit your party agenda while half the media or more go merrily along with it. The public don’t see truth surrounding our leadership but a reflection that’s often far removed from reality. And it’s been this way since the beginning.

How do you use the democratic process to hold someone accountable for weakening the democratic process? That’s like running barefoot to catch someone who stole your shoes.

I don’t think elections themselves, or manipulating what people care about, is the “simplest way” to do anything. It will make a giant mess, but there are simpler ways to do that too.

I don’t know the simplest way, but my guess is that it includes breaking down the current few large non-self-sufficient communities with poorly-defined value systems and weak social fabric into many small self-sufficient communities with well-defined value systems and strong social fabric, each of which will have less internal turmoil and therefore be better-equipped to be a healthy member of the ecosystem.

> I respectfully disagree; we want them accountable to the public. The simplest way to have politicians accountable to public opinion (without violence) is by making them have to care about elections. That's the entire point of democracy.

Having them care about getting reelected is one thing, having them care primarily about funding their campaign (because, while the deepest pockets may not always win, that is usually the way to bet) is quite another.

> This, to me, is the heart of the issue. American politics are fundamentally corrupted by campaign financing

British politics is not; the scale of our financial political scandals would make a DC lobbyist giggle at the quaintness of it. This is also true of the other Five Eyes, and yet all of them are trying to be just as aggressive as each other, there’s just a difference in scale of the parent country.

I’m not arguing for or against anything here, just noting that intelligence agencies in similar countries which aren’t beset by campaign finance woes are doing exactly the same thing.

Even our most powerful political leaders are actually afraid of intelligence services as Senator Schumer once explained.

> Schumer: “Let me tell you. You take on the intelligence community. They have six ways from Sunday at getting back at ya.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rH0EBAyhnA

>This is true, but it's not the entire truth either. Most congressmen don't have access to the really sensitive intelligence that comes from these surveillance operations, so it can't be that useful to many of them.

Pretty easy fix is to make it illegal for them to not have the info. Then again I would prefer laws entirely removing the idea of sensitive information from the government. It is like a gun. A useful tool, very important for defending yourself, but those who have abused it in the past lose the right to it no matter how useful it is. The government has abused secret information in the past and as such should no longer be alloweed to have it. I rather we didn't have spies than to have the same laws protecting spies also cover up and enable child sexual abuse.

They're spooks. This is what they're for. The constraints are at best just theatre, obviously their adversaries aren't going to obey these rules, and they know that so if they are to be effective (and if they aren't why would they exist at all?) they will also disobey these rules.

The purpose of such rules in practice is to help the American public to sleep at night despite having tacitly authorised a nightmare. You know the scene in Casablance, even if you've never watched the movie - it has permeated our culture Captain Renault claims to be shocked to discover that the club is being used for gambling, undercut by a croupier giving him his winnings.

If you don't want spooks to do what spooks do, don't pass a law saying it mustn't happen, don't vote for a government that promises they'll exercise oversight over the spooks to prevent it. Just get rid of the spooks. Congress could, if the American people wanted - which they do not - abolish these agencies entirely. They'd just cease to exist and while I'm sure some small scale abuses would continue you just can't run programmes to snoop these huge volumes on pocket change, and companies would be less likely to co-operate with informal requests than with the Department of Justice.

But as much as they enjoy bluster, Americans are afraid, and so the spooks will certainly continue to be authorised and "outrages" will happen when once in a while it is revealed that the spooks are doing what spooks do but nothing actually changes. Eventually it'll get to be so routine the The Onion has a pre-built news article for it like for the mass shootings.

Huge parts of these agencies' activities have been moved off the books or to private entities. It's not as simple a matter as just cutting off their funding anymore.

The off-the-books money that the CIA uses to pay those shady Raytheon subsidiaries doesn't appear out of thin air. It may be several layers removed and cycled through a few South American laundromats, but its genesis is always the U.S. Treasury.

The genesis is often illegal activities of various kinds, especially drug trafficking. Although I agree that is probably not enough money to run a mass surveillance operation on the scale of the NSA in perpetuity.

Sure, but the money still has to come from somewhere, and that's from appropriations authorized by Congress.

Now, if you believe that these agencies have amassed and hoarded enough of the money they've already been given that they now have an endowment that can perpetually fund their activities, then yes, that would mean you really can't stop them. But I'd find it hard to believe that's the case; what they do is not cheap, and I'd be surprised if there's all that much left over after they spend their yearly budget on regular operations.

If Congress voted to completely defund these agencies, they'd go away. Not immediately, and I'm sure there will still be some in power who create limited shadow agencies that run on much, much smaller budgets, but they can't operate at the scale they do now without continued funding.

I'm not so sure they would go away without a fight. These are people who gave grown accustomed to breaking laws (including US laws), fomenting coups, and even assassinations in order to gain control. If Congress was seriously threatening to abolish them, Congressmen might start having a sharp uptick in "accidents". That's the problem with getting in bed with dubious characters.

Oh, certainly. But I find it hard to believe that these agencies would keep the support of the public if they started assassinating Congresspeople. At some point there's too much opposition to make it feasible to continue on.

Really, though, I'd expect them to maintain Congress' support through non-lethal means. Bribery, blackmail, stuff like that. A Congressperson in your pocket is much more useful than a suspiciously-dead body.

But still, if US citizens as a whole really wanted them gone, they'd just continue voting in people who will take a hard line against funding them.

I don't expect something like this to come to pass, mind you, but it's possible.

https://www.iqt.org/

Not sure what your point is. Sure, the 3-letter agencies have an investment arm, but the capital used for those investments is a tiny fraction of their operating budget. And that capital still comes from Congress' appropriations.

The parent previously offered that three letter agencies would require an investment arm to sustain themselves. In that context, I offered that they had one. I can't claim any knowledge about the profitability of that group or what portion of funding is provided by that group which is relevant and you have added perspective on. I have personally experienced InQTel as an alternative funding mechanism which argues against it being a serious funding source.

> Now, if you believe that these agencies have amassed and hoarded enough of the money they've already been given that they now have an endowment that can perpetually fund their activities, then yes, that would mean you really can't stop them. But I'd find it hard to believe that's the case; what they do is not cheap, and I'd be surprised if there's all that much left over after they spend their yearly budget on regular operations.

What do you think In-Q-Tel[1] is for? It's about ensuring that the TLAs will exist in perpetuity regardless of Congress.

1. http://www.iqt.org

"The money has to come"

And the hope, with all this surrounding us, that somebody must made exclusive findings ? P-:

>and if they aren't why would they exist at all?

Reminds me of Lisa simpsons rock which protects against tigers.

I read that as "if they aren't going to be effective". Not a claim that they are effective, but a claim that they're intended to be effective.

> >and if they aren't why would they exist at all?

> Reminds me of Lisa simpsons rock which protects against tigers.

Reminds me of Ernie's banana in the ear:

https://youtu.be/zwsmqZLCKPE

> But as much as they enjoy bluster, Americans are afraid [...]

Are Americans really afraid? Or is it that Americans feel comfort in having the meanest dog on the block, even if that dog sometimes nips its master?

When I expressed horror and outrage at the notion that the TSA can go through your luggage, an American friend told me "well if it keeps us safe...", so I'd say "afraid".

First of all, it's not at all clear that this implies fear as I understand the emotion.

More tangentially, as I usually fly outside the US, it's fair to say that this is far from just an American reality. For example, the Dublin Airport even explicitly mentions that hold baggage may also be searched by hand on their website: > "Both your carry-on luggage and check-in baggage will be checked by means of detection equipment and may also be subject to a hand search." [1]

I have a hard time believing that airports with any restrictions on what check-in/hold baggage may contain (virtually all of them, if not all) don't have any provisions for searching bags, although maybe I'm wrong here.

[1] https://www.dublinairport.com/at-the-airport/security

Maybe they have provisions, but the only time I've had my luggage searched was in the US.

That doesn’t sound like fear but acceptance.

Although, what country doesn’t have the ability to dig through your luggage? In my personal experience, Europe is the only place that I’ve seen armed officers dig through 100% of the bags on a flight while the entire airport watched.

If you have a family member that watches Fox News and then check some of their primetime programming out, you'll see both the fear and where that fear comes from.

And you could do the same with CNN and MSNBC. Don't single out one source, they're all peddling fear just in different ways.

Whenever news org echo dire Gov warnings

[1] without vetting the evidence (or highlighting the lack thereof) &

[2] without the context of how often these turn out to be true/false

they're part of the FUD Generation Machine

I don't really disagree but I will single out Fox News because it's completely valid to do so. They are a much more blatant offender than any other outlet and essentially wrote the playbook on fear-mongering for political gain in this country. It's silly to deny the extent of their influence on the media landscape in your desire to seem equitable.

Fox News did indeed set us on that path initially, but it's also silly to deny the extent of the rest of the networks' buy-in into this playbook.

Fox News' use of the "FOX NEWS ALERT" interruptions and the fear mongering were quickly replicated by all the other major cable networks in an attempt to compete. All of the networks were complicit in selling us into war with lies,

I think it's really more silly and uninformed to single out Fox News, given the current media ecology and political climate. Today's CNN and MSNBC will do things that are simply treacherous, making Fox News look tame by comparison. We're in a new era now.

Fear and sensationalism sells news - yes. And Fox, CNN, and MSNBC are guilty of that - yes. But that does not mean they are in any way equivalent or as-bad-as-each-other. They are not.

Fox News uses fear - and the degree at which their resident pundits use falsehoods and misrepresent the truth - and use fear as a partisan tool to push one single political party - is far beyond CNN and MSNBC.

The old "We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm." - anon

> Congress could, if the American people wanted - which they do not - abolish these agencies entirely.

Unfortunately that's not now power works, not even in a relatively free society such as the US. How often does the public actually get their way when it comes to policy? Once elected, representatives will almost certainly follow the same agenda - work hard to maintain power and privilege for the existing ruling class. Secret services with discretionary power are an invaluable tool in this endeavor.

Sorry but I disagree (partially). Where I agree is that covert agents operating abroad are by-definition criminals. Foreign governments don't give permission for spies to be present, and they break all sorts of their nations host laws while there. Morally this is questionable... if you believe that 'all men' have 'certain unalienable rights' then surely those should apply to how you treat all humans on earth and not only your own citizens; but most countries and their citizens accept the cat and mouse game that is spying abroad.

Where I disagree is that these powers are unchecked and tolerated when used on a country's own citizens. The mandate of both of these organizations is crystal fucking clear - do bad shit abroad but not to your own citizens. There has to be oversight of this, that oversight has to be built into the system, and there have to be consequences. Knowingly collect data on US citizens: go to jail. Fail to regularly audit whether or not you are inadvertently collecting data on US citizens: go to jail. Torture, steal, trespass, hack? Jail. Know that someone has done this and look the other way? Jail. But what about domestic terrorism, or important exceptions? No problem! Get a warrant.

This whole business of "we don't want spies to be afraid to their job" is bullshit... As a business owner it would be much easier to not pay my taxes, defraud investors, avoid safety regulations, and have my competition murdered. But I don't do it (and I'm not preoccupied with dread about it). Either our shared values (e.g. the constitution) are important or they are not.

At a tangent to your (marvelous) response:

> But what about domestic terrorism, or important exceptions? No problem! Get a warrant.

I've heard about accounts of police investigations being aided with access to the mass surveillance data (through the FBI, I believe). It never goes to a FISA court, and the police use the information to develop a pretext for a warrant.

So even with a warrant, the power may still be unchecked. I believe it reasonable to conclude that conducting mass surveillance can't reliably done without abridging constitutional rights. I guess that leads us back to the unresolved conversation from early in this century about the trade-offs between liberty, privacy, and security.

The practice of obtaining warrants with artificial but believable evidentiary basis to conceal the illicit means by which the basis was actually obtained is called "parallel construction", and the intentional practice or facilitation of it should be a felony with a maximum penalty of imprisonment of up to 50 years (2.5x evidence tampering, and I'd be fine with a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years). It is a heinous perversion of the public trust, knowingly undertaken by unchecked law enforcement personnel to wilfully conceal unconstitutional acts. Parallel construction is a stain upon the very fabric of our nation... Or, you know, business as usual.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

Parallel construction combined with the repeal of Habeus Corpus is reason enough to be rioting in the streets.

> do bad shit abroad but not to your own citizens

Well, yeah, that's the entire point of the Five Eyes: each member can spy on the others and share the results with the rest of them, but if one member were to spy on its own people, perish the thought! That would be unconstitutional!

Backwardly? Media and the wrong picture of a "good america" ? ^^

Certainly you could have spooks and not grant them unlimited power.

And, in the case of bulk collection, it's quite obviously made them worse at doing what they're supposed to be doing.

These agencies are part of the executive and greenlit by the legislature. Mentally divorcing them from that is part of the problem and creates this exact situation where the agencies roam uncontrolled.

The chain of accountability for their actions does not end at the head of the agency. It extends into both the White House as well as Congress. As indeed "resignations here and there" are pointless, the public perception needs to shift to a point where elected officials are actually held to what they do (as opposed to, as is frequently happening, what they say.)

i wonder if this this state of affairs is the result of the patriot act [1]; or did they have similar regulations in the US before that event?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act,_Title_II

> it seems to me that the executive and the legislature are truly toothless in the face of these three-letter agencies.

This is by design, a design which was cemented in place on November 22, 1963. If real accountability ever comes to the intelligence agencies, it won't come from the executive or legislative branches over which they exert a lethal veto.

For those of us with less detailed knowledge of US history: I take it you are referring to the assassination of president John F Kennedy?

Yes. The CIA had already started circumventing the POTUS's executive authority in Eisenhower's administration with unauthorized U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union, but it was when a rogue faction within it assassinated Kennedy (with some "special" help) that the CIA became the final word on any matters of real consequence to the U.S. empire.

Assuming the CIA assassinated a president because at one point someone gave a command without being explicitly authorized from their superior is quite a leap, don't you think?

I have heard many different equally baseless conspiracy conspiracy theories about this by now, and they all have two things in common: They each conflict with the other theories and their adherents all sound utterly convinced they are right. Which tells you something about people and their theories.

> Assuming the CIA assassinated a president because at one point someone gave a command without being explicitly authorized from their superior is quite a leap, don't you think?

Indeed it would be, and that's not what I was doing in my post. I brought up the U-2/Eisenhower history only to establish that the CIA was already taking steps to make itself the final arbiter on policy, above and independent from the POTUS. Especially when it came to any potential rapprochement in the Cold War, toward which JFK was also making serious overtures just before he was killed.

You can go looking through the vast numbers of theories around JFK's killing and find absurd ones I'm sure, but lumping them all together into one big undifferentiated mass hardly makes for a good argument. In favor of the existence of a conspiracy, there are numerous witnesses and extensive documented and circumstantial evidence, and the motive for such a conspiracy is clear. It's one thing if you don't find that evidence persuasive but it's ridiculous to call it "baseless."

Few things can stand up against the ‘national security’ argument in America (maybe even nothing). A court ruling like this will be overturned in a heartbeat with any kind of terrorist attack. Don’t count out the current domestic unrest to lead to legislation that buffs up these agencies going forward if the Republicans win again.

There is a Decemberists refrain about the reaction to 9/11, the war on terror: "Because America can, and America can't say no." Or at least, I thought it stood for that, at the time.

Part of a solution may be to introduce a "principle of proportionality" like [1] (if one does not already exist), and to aggressively remove the bugs in the US judicial system that prevent ordinary courts from examining the spies, the military and the executive. Like the state secrets privilege [2]. Then the system can prevent itself from backsliding during crises.

Laws are no good if courts take 10 years or more to figure out whether they have jurisdiction over, or are able to subpoena evidence relating to, crass, publicly known, obviously illegal, civil rights violations. If courts take too long, standards shift, are forgotten, then abolished. The normative power of the facts.

Jewel vs NSA has taken 10 years and has gotten nowhere.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_(law)#European...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_secrets_privilege

The problem is any contemporaneous litigation on any of these programs is always thwarted with ‘endangering ongoing investigations’ excuses.

If that were true, I think Trump would already be gone.

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