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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

"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...

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