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Comment by nverno | Hacker News Reader

> current average level of comfort with government involvement

It really all comes down to this- it's largely a matter of personal comfort/risk tolerance. Personally, I'd be happy to see entire agencies wiped out, the CIA and the NSA obliterated, the FBI cut back to where it was in the 60s or so, preferably focused on mob/cartel activity and the like. The CIA should never have been separated out from the military and given so much free reign. From my point of view, the CIA's history is just a series of catastrophic mistakes. There's arguments to made on both sides, but no objectively clear right or wrong choice.

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Doesn't the NSA represent a huge portion of our signals intelligence capabilities as a country? How would that role be filled otherwise? Wouldn't the best people to do many of those new jobs still be the people who used to work at the (now defunct) NSA?

The internal security is doing fine without NSA and when their biggest "achievement" was making everyone less secure via encryption backdoors you gotta wonder about purpose of existence.

Private industries seem to do just fine when it comes to security and nearly none of the progress in security is due to NSA, unless you count "looking real hard whether NSA didn't try to backdoor new security primitive" as progress

Not only that but all the backdoors and 0days they know about but choose to exploit rather than making the whole world safer and fixing/notifying.

I may be terribly naive, but I just don't feel any safer b/c the NSA exists. I also don't believe this country has been under any serious threats since the NSA was created, from which it protected us.

The FBI in the 60s was inflitrating and disrupting civil rights groups.

Right, just another example of many mistakes made by these agencies since their inception. I do think there is legitimate need for some form of FBI, though.

What makes you think they've stopped?

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