NSA: It Would Violate Your Privacy to Say if We Spied on You

This makes me wonder if the Wired article got a little jumpy when it wrote "the National Security Agency won’t tell two powerful United States Senators how many Americans have had their communications picked up." Perhaps they've been told, but are not allowed to disclose the number publicly? Even if the latter is the case, it is disconcerting that elected officials cannot convey basic information about the laws they vote for to their constituents.

The answer to that question cannot possibly violate the privacy of any individual.

>> What’s more, McCullough argued, giving such a figure of how many Americans were spied on was “beyond the capacity” of the NSA’s in-house watchdog...

So, either: 1) They are totally disorganized ("dang, it's not like we keep a database we could SELECT COUNT(*) from, you know...") or 2) there is no way to estimate because they're doing wholesale collection of all the phone calls, web traffic, etc that they can get their hands on.

Pretty sure it's #2.

Facebook and Google are the new Halliburton and Lockheed of the age of behavior tracking and counterterrorism...

Both companies spend millions per year to provide elaborate back doors into their network for the NSA, FBI, and other government agencies.

Both firms are too important not to become members of the military industrial complex... Their behavior tracking technology is trusted, ubiquitous, and has far broader reach than government systems.

It starts with backdoors and warrants, then backdoors without warrants, then massive data mining and "preemptive" search of personal data, then installing government payloads on customer laptops, etc. etc.

I don't see how anyone can trust firms that go along with warrantless backdoor policies not to install government payloads on customer machines when asked.

First counterterrorism, then the IRS and immigration policies (better not mention your cleaning lady in a gmail message), then GPS data harvested and speeding tickets retroactively issued.

If you want to really get a feel for the situation, read Crypto: http://www.amazon.com/Crypto-Rebels-Government-Privacy-Digit... It's a book about how cryptography was finally accepted and allowed in the U.S., and how the NSA handled the growth of everyday crypto (hint: not without a fight).

It's not about a government agency trying to control everything and turn the U.S. into 1984, it's about an agency getting swept up in their own mission of secrecy and surveillance, and sometimes (in my opinion) using it as an argumentative technique to advance their agenda. This is just another obvious example of that.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Information_Awarenes...

[edit] of course provisions for being of sound mind (as with any contract) and being of age of majority (i.e. an adult capable of consenting)

Last I checked, not everyone inside the US was a citizen. In fact, I would posit that the VAST majority of people NSA is listening in on, are non-citizens.

I am also curious why everyone is worried about NSA and not the FBI. NSA isn't interested in the US, they care about the rest of the world. This isn't anecdotal information.

Does that mean anything publicly viewable (like this comment) or anything which is broadcast to a large group (like, something that your Facebook friends can see - you can "reasonably" assume one of them is overseas) then it's fair game?

With compartmentization and the short terms of congress people (2 years and then there could be a change, worse if the party in control switches) nobody knows what our top secret money is spent on. It's so bad that we ask the people we give the money to if what they are doing is worth while because nobody knows and nobody wants to be the guy that cut the budget of x y ad z and let the terrorists attack again.

Think on the order of a half trillion dollars that they can kind of account for (it's black, could be more, probably not tons less) that we have no idea what it actually does.

Funny thing, NSA might not know and probably doesn't have an easy way to find out. This is an artistic response in that it doesn't make them sound like idiots for not knowing. there is just a staggering amount of communication going on, even if tried really hard to follow the rules try would still screw up.

But keep feeding that industrial war complex. Peace will certainly come from all that.

I'm personally irked at the lack of legislative oversight.

There's some twisted comedy in trying to trip up or catch the NSA though. They already know what you're going to say, ask, or pursue.

To see this, consider: after someone spies on you, what's the least damage they can do to your privacy? Obviously the most is to publish everything they have on you for everyone. But what's the least?

The least damage is to completely forget it, never mention it, never think about it, and not even acknowledge or record it - let the world be exactly the same as if they had not spied on me.

I'm not saying this is better than ACTUALLY not ever spying on me, but it's the best thing for my privacy once they have.

Say you're a security person and do bag searches, a celebrity comes through and you actually see something very embarrassing in their bag, on some subject there's been public speculation on. (Their sexuality, whether they have some disease and you see meds for it, whatever). What's the best way to protect their privacy after you clear them (nothing dangerous in the bag)?

Obviously, by not even mentioning/acknowledging that you searched them, just by moving on.

If all my email (along with everyone else's) is being scanned to see if I'm concocting a terrorist plot, then the best you can do after this fact is not even ackowledge this and in every way act and produce a world as though it never happened.

Note that this does not make the original invasion of privacy any better. It doesn't condone it. It may also make it harder to instate more appropriate privacy policies in the future. But the premise "If I answered you 'every single person on US territory who has sent an email or made or received a telephone call in the past 36 months' then it would violate your privacy" is not completely devoid of any merit. Should every single person's privacy have been violated? No. We have constitutional protections against that sort of thing.

If it has, would it violate their privacy further to go boasting about this fact? What if it means that anyone suing you for anything can use this knowledge to do discovery and request your communications from the government? In this and a myriad other scenarios, telling the extent to which you invaded people's privacy can be worse for their privacy than refusing to do so.

Not saying I'm convinced. I'm just saying there's a little something in this line of thought. Obviously the late Martin Luther King's privacy is far worse off now than if we never knew that the FBI kept detailed files on him...