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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

> "Everyone should just calm down and understand this isn't anything that is brand new,'' said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.), who added that the phone-data program has "worked to prevent'' terrorist attacks.

Politicians are so bad at making reassuring statements in cases like these that I wonder why they even try?

Also, I wonder if someone at the agency/intelligence committees would kindly point out what this great data net was doing when two young and very Internet-active men decided to blow up the Boston Marathon and were only caught through (video at the scene) surveillance tapes?

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The NSA info gathering program is still in it's infancy. People who have been paying attention (e.g. The EFF) have known the score for well over a decade.

To answer your question: The NSA stores EVERYTHING, but they do not yet have the computational ability to parse everything and make sense out of those reams of data. They can certainly do this to some extent but it's very limited. IIRC this came out in the early 2000s from various NSA whistleblowers who were completely ignored like usual.

> IIRC this came out in the early 2000s from various NSA whistleblowers who were completely ignored like usual.

Well clearly the concerned just had their tinfoil hats too tight. /s

I wonder how long it will be until people start dismissing others as conspiracy theorist nutters for believing that the NSA is doing this shit. Days probably, I'll put money on 'under a week'.

Ignored != dismissed. The NSA has been around since 1952 and has briefly come into the spotlight for collecting data on US persons several times. The vast majority of people of people in the US (AFAICT) don't care. It's not that they don't believe such things happen, it's that they're largely indifferent to it.

This isn't entirely irrational. After all, we both know that the probability of one of us getting blown up by a terrorist is vanishingly small, right? So although we disapprove of terrorism in general, we don't feel all that threatened by it, personally, and think that people ought to have a sense of perspective about the actual probability rather than focusing on how bad it would be if it happened to us. Likewise, the probability of ending up as the innocent victim of government intelligence probe that ruins one's life is negligible for most people. So small, in fact, that it probably cancels out with the risk from terrorism in the mental calculus of the average American.

Lovely argument. If something just manages to sneak under the radar long enough, then surely it must be acceptable. Criminals should try that argument in court. "Your honour, I was able to successfully keep on embezzling for several years without detection, so surely it doesn't do any harm if I keep it up just because I finally got caught?"

The data net was there and doing great, they just didn't have enough personnel and bandwidth to stop it in time. This is actually great news, it means there's a great demand for talented, technologically-minded individuals.

>Politicians are so bad at making reassuring statements in cases like these that I wonder why they even try?

Wow, you're being nice to him. Was his first thought: "Oh something everyone seems to hate? Better tell them we've been doing it for AGES. That'll help, right?"

But my big question is: "Oh, you say 'the phone-data program has `worked to prevent` terrorist attacks.' Please, tell me more. With extensive details."

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