Hacker News Reader

Comment by mike_d | Hacker News Reader

You don't agree with the tiny sliver of the NSA mission that you know about.

90% of the work they do is purely defensive. The offensive work targets bad actors and foreign governments/militaries, compared to other countries intelligence services that also engage in economic espionage.

In a perfect world they wouldn't need to exist at all. But we don't live in that world.

View on HN

You contradict yourself. If you don't know what they are doing behind the curtain, how can you be so confident that 90% of what they do is defensive?

They don't work within the bounds of the law and constitution, and thus their mission is bad by my simple definition. I don't need to know what they do in secret.

"They don't work within the bounds of the law and constitution"

So what has your research on this uncovered?

The first thing that comes to my mind is the whole Snowden series of events. Spying every citizen, is wrong. Also, I'm seeing the effects of something similar in my country, where this sort of spying is used to curb free speech, dissent, and completely kill the very essence of democracy.

It is wrong, and there has to be better ways. I don't remember the exact procedure, but NSA didn't need much clearance to spy on any American citizen.

Are you really unaware of this? It was the top story in the country for months. A documentary about it even won an Oscar. As someone else has already replied, we are talking about the vast domestic spying apparatus that Snowden revealed, including the PRISM and xkeyscore programs. They are unquestionably unconstitutional and illegal. Anyone that suggested they existed before the reveal was an insane paranoid nutjob. Furthermore, the fact that there was virtually nothing done about this severe crime by the rest of the government indicates that the entire system is a farce. The NSA is still doing the same thing as before, and probably more.

Another angle is how do you prosecute the head of intelligence when everything is supposed to be secret.

That is what Denmark is trying to find out:

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/denmark-charges-spy-chi...

Sometimes people have clearances and they speak vaguely to avoid literal jail. Consequences are high here.

Ok and sometimes people just say unsubstantiated shit on the internet. Which one is it? Do you have some inside knowledge on the commenter?

I can’t comment on the specific poster, but I once held a clearance and can relate.

People with clearances also have huge incentives to lie to themselves about the decency of what they're doing. One of the main thing secrecy protects, is such people's morale.

You know what they say, "if they cheat with you, they cheat on you too". A liar is a liar. If your job involves seeking people's trust in order to betray it, you're not very smart if you think your boss wouldn't betray you.

Given the natural opaqueness of the organization I would likely fundamentally disagree with a great deal more of what the NSA mission is if I had any knowledge of it.

They also basically have zero real congressional oversight.

And just because 90% of what they do is purely defensive doesn't make the 10% any more acceptable (x key score, data mining, hooking into Google, etc.)

> 90% of the work they do is purely defensive.

You have literally no idea whether that’s true. Even if you somehow did, you couldn’t prove it here.

You could be right—but your assertion has zero credibility.

How do you square this with the constitution? Need to capture all the data on the internet and sift through it for the greater good?

Clearly not, and if we look at who enacted the NSA and current events of stifling speech we have a clear answer.

> You don't agree with the tiny sliver of the NSA mission that you know about.

Strong "trust me bro" vibes.

Hand-waving and baseless assertions don't contradict the fact that it conducts activities against it's country's most basic founding principles and laws.

This regrettable line of argument is in line with blindly defending the police in spite of all the police murders, abuse, and outright corruption.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com