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Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

On the subject of FBI/NSA/CIA insincerity, that makes me think of various post-9/11 debates often involving "ticking bomb" Hollywood scenarios.

I'd like to reiterate that any kind of "OMG there's no time we must stop the NYC WMD ASAP" scenario already has a special exception route: Just commit the necessary spying/theft/torture crime, and plan for a Presidential pardon after explaining the extraordinary circumstances that totally justified your action.

If they aren't willing to put their own skin in the game, then the situation cannot be as clearly dire as they claim.

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> On the subject of FBI/NSA/CIA insincerity, that makes me think of various post-9/11 debates often involving "ticking bomb" Hollywood scenarios.

It would be appropriate if we could reverse "ticking bomb" scenario. What if we suspect that government is about to break construction, would it be appropriate for citizens to torture public officials to reveal such information? After all neither of them (government and citizens) should be able to do so legally.

That’s insincere. Even if you truly believe a catastrophe may happen you may not be willing to risk life in prison because the President doesn’t like your bosses boss.

NSA analyst?

You really think in that case they'd be bound by the President's likes and dislikes? If the President or whatever court didn't let them out, there would be riots in the streets.

Nope, most successfully stopped attacks are secret. Nobody would even know.

There are or should be at least (bound by national security related laws) oversight review committees and stats reporting...

... but of course it depends on the standard for what 'prevented' means. De-radicalized a potential terrorist, does that mean a terror attack was stopped/prevented.

It's quite complicated in practice, alas.

I mean, aren't they quite busy radicalising the mentally ill just so they can then capture the mark in the process of following the plan they developed for them just so they bump up their 'terrorist plan foiled' stats?

No they're not. If our bloated "national security" apparatus could possibly justify its existence, it would. The reason they keep such justification secret is because it doesn't exist. It has nothing to do with "sources and methods." It has nothing to do with "civil unrest."

The reason we can't see the justification is because it doesn't exist.

They don't tell you because they don't feel the need to justify it to you. They do tell some of it individuals with the proper clearances who hold some level of power over them (comittees etc).

Here is a small list of the ones that were publicized. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsuccessful_terrori...

Laughable. This list substantiates my point.

What is laughable about that list?

It doesn't really speak to or against your point. You're not going to justify an entire national security system on a subset of one of its many functions.

> they don't feel the need to justify it to you

Yes, that is the primary problem with spy agencies - that they don't feel accountable. They SHOULD be.

What does accountability look like for those agencies or other government agencies in general? How can we achieve that?

The current paradigm is that agencies generally are accountable to congressional committees and the courts. I'm not sure how we would make them accountable to the public when there's very little accountability for elected representatives even.

Why would we keep them secret forever?

Probably not forever, but until the systems/methods they used become obsolete. You don't burn your intel collection mechanisms to publicize something that the public was never aware of in the fist place.

Are they? Sounds like a BS theory, promoted to make them sound secretly more competent than they are ("we're great and stop a lot of attacks, we just aren't telling you". Yeah, right).

The truth is that even a minor succesfully stopped attack they'd advertise till the end of time, to score political and press points.

You don't burn your methods and systems for some political points.

LOL, "methods and systems"... from the people who couldn't see the collapse of the USSR, 7/11, and countless others failures...

It seems to me like you are trolling given your low effort and inflamatory responses.

I didn't say they're perfect methods or systems. Intelligence operations have mixed outcones partially dependent on adversarial actions such as ops sec or counterintel. This isn't a new or unique phenomenon.

There are already riots in the street and it doesn't influence presidential decisions.

Those wont be the kind of riots they use to score political points from either side.

If you can't justify that risk tradeoff, then it's probably not that catastrophic to begin with.

> life in prison because the President doesn’t like your bosses boss

1. If the President hates the CIA/NSA/FBI director that much they tend to get quickly replaced.

2. Punishing a lower-level agent with prison doesn't seem like an effective way to get revenge on whatever agency leadership the President might hate.

You're making an appeal to a compound scenario: It isn't just (A) "Hollywood ticking bomb" unlikely, but also (B) "TV political backstabbing drama" unlikely, multiplied again by (C) "stupidly baroque form of revenge" unlikely... to get a final probability somewhere near zero-point-zero-zero-not-gonna-happen-LOL.

So no, I don't think that fantastical hypothetical justifies day-to-day erosion of rule-of-law and civil rights.

> Even if you truly believe a catastrophe may happen

If someone truly believes it and they have a reasonable basis behind that belief [0], then surely the morality of saving millions from an atomic fireball or whatever goes pretty dang far in outweighing 1-20 years in federal prison, and they will have ample evidence to make a strong case for getting a pardon.

[0] If spy/agent/analyst dude "truly believes" but for no real reason other than voices in their head, a prophetic dream, hidden scriptures, or alphabet-soup... they are already incompetent and need to be fired immediately to remove them from that position of authority.

Play this out with the recent Hamas attack. You decide to torture some Hamas member and discover plans of this attack. You feed the info to Israel who then changes their patrol pattern and Hamas pulls their attack plan.

Now you are in trial for torturing this guy. You state that you stopped a major attack. Israel isn’t even fully convinced an attack was eminent, despite you being confident. Even other members of Hamas provide evidence on your behalf, but it looks bad for everyone involved that torture was needed. It’s much better looking to the general intelligence establishment that you acted ina rogue manner doing something that may have at best helped a little and at worst had ignited a whole international crisis of torture of a Palestinian.

I think for a lot of people they would be fine to just see how things play out and later say “if we tortured this guy who later admitted to know we could’ve stopped the attack”.

The proof is in the pudding! Since there have been no horrible events since the ultra-law was enacted, it must be working!

No polar bears in Arizona either since I installed my anti-polar-bear device there. Must be working!

Lisa Simpson [0] approved.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnBMwPcRbVE

A good friend who worked for DoD explained it well to me: unseemly behavior in response to “ticking time bomb” scenarios should be absolutely 100% illegal; don’t worry, if it ever actually happens (unlikely) we will break the law and ask for forgiveness.

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