DNI Statement on Recent Unauthorized Disclosures of Classified Information | Hacker News Reader

DNI Statement on Recent Unauthorized Disclosures of Classified Information

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89 pointsmerinid26 comments

Discussing programs like this publicly will have an impact on the behavior of our adversaries and make it more difficult for us to understand their intentions.

Tough. Work harder.

Surveillance programs like this one are consistently subject to safeguards that are designed to strike the appropriate balance between national security interests and civil liberties and privacy concerns

Words, words, words, words... blah, blah, blah, Fluffy.

YOU, Mr. Clapper and your agency, are accountable to US, you know, the "We The People" bit? And when you operate in the shadows, hidden away behind a wall of secrecy and classified information, you are breaking the bond between "your behavior" and "our ability to police that behavior". And that just is not acceptable. And don't give me this bullshit about Congress performing oversight. I trust Congress as far as I can throw it, and there's not a soul serving there that I voted for or that I consider to represent me. And I know a lot of other Americans feel the same way.

You spooks just need to learn to deal with the fact that we demand you operate in daylight, not in darkness, in the open, not behind a veil... WE are your Panopticon guards.

This is a free and open society, and we don't do shadow governments, Stasi like special police, and all that totalitarian bullshit. You assholes got caught doing something you shouldn't be doing, and if the people of this country have a shred of backbone left, you're going to be held accountable for it.

> Surveillance programs like this one are consistently subject to safeguards

Not sure if they realize but saying that makes it worse. It is like the thief caught red handed stealing saying "this is a very responsible operations, victims are carefully screened ... blah ... blah"

>> In order to provide a more thorough understanding of the program, I have directed that certain information related to the “business records” provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act be declassified and immediately released to the public.

This is the only part of this release I really take issue with. If you can immediately direct that the information be declassified without first taking pause to think if it, combined with other information, could be dangerous then it should never have been classified in the first place. It takes a lot of care to properly evaluate that. If you had thought about it before, and still came to that conclusion then it shouldn't have been done in a secret court anyway. Secret courts are for really specific things... they are limited in supervision and accountability and aren't for stuff you'd rather not have your citizenry, whom you are responsible to and for, asking questions about.

> it should never have been classified in the first place

The system is big with lots of moving cogs in it. The bigger it is the higher the chance one of the cogs will pull a Manning. They see the idiocy and waste. Classifying stuff that is shameful and sweeping it under the carpet works for a while, but soon enough someone will say fuck it, this is going against the principles of my country and my moral standards and they'll leak the shit out of it.

From their side, it is imperative to persecute and punish whistle-blowers, leakers as harshly as possible. In order to set examples.

This is the guy that, when asked by congress (I assume under oath) if the NSA was collecting data on US citizens, he responded "No sir." That was just 3 months ago.

So... not sure what his statements are worth now...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwiUVUJmGjs&t=6m10s (starts at 6 minutes 10 seconds)

I am sure he was briefed by DOJ on what words to exactly say in order to get off on some technicality (ah but it is not "collecting" it is ... "intercepting" LOL!).

On the other had, so he lied to Congress. What happens next? A slap on the wrist, public shaming? The public will forget about it as soon as the next major hurricane or tornado hits.

I don't think the public is going to forget. The media seems to have started an all out war against the government ever since the AP/Reporter DOJ scandal - just my opinion. I don't think the media is going to let anyone forget this anytime soon, but we'll see. As for what happens next for lying to congress... I assume nothing. Maybe Congress will do a 180, they're pretty good at reversing their positions when not doing so means losing votes and their job. I'm skeptical anyone will actually be punished for this. It's in the media's hands. The public has no power at this point.

404'd. Here, have some cached content:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.dni...

http://pastebin.com/zRgpetMe

Why did this 404? Wow.

No longer 404ing

The office of the DNI just officially changed the link to: http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/191-pre...

All within minutes. Check the difference on their twitter feed: https://twitter.com/ODNIgov

Not the same document.

You are absolutely right my bad - was haste of me. Still another interesting document. Wonder why the first is gone.

Much less info, if that's supposed to be accomplishing the same thing. In particular, this implicit acknowledgement that they're Hoovering up a lot of telephone connection metadata:

"By order of the FISC, the Government is prohibited from indiscriminately sifting through the telephony metadata acquired under the program. All information that is acquired under this program is subject to strict, court-imposed restrictions on review and handling. The court only allows the data to be queried when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization. Only specially cleared counterterrorism personnel specifically trained in the Court-approved procedures may even access the records."

Given that they aren't disposing this data, that their searches today are, at least officially, narrow, is of little reassurance.

You can't query this much data with clustering it, indexing it, analyzing it first somehow.

Nah, check out data warehouses. This data is really limited in details (anything more than from and to telephone numbers, and start and stop times?), and can be shoved into a data warehouse without any analysis as that word is generally understood.

Of course it gets indexed, but that's automatic and mindless.

I see your point but I am so tempted to assume that they are not just storing it in some flat dump but trying to extract some sort of higher order representation of the data as they are processing it into the warehouse. You could argue that surfacing trends is technically not "querying".

http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/2013/slides/big_graph_nsa_rd_2013...

You can dismiss any discussion now about collecting "metadata", as it's just a distraction. Cat is out of the bag that they're also collecting everything, just under a different name.

Yeah, PRISM!

Great quote: "Discussing programs like this publicly will have an impact on the behavior of our adversaries and make it more difficult for us to understand their intentions."

Considering the scope of the domestic monitoring, the definition of adversaries is disturbingly close to ordinary citizens.

"Such as telephone number and length of calls .... "

and of course IMEI - ie exactly which device you were using, where you were at the time etc..

I cannot change the URL - can an admin do so on HN?

"The collection is broad in scope[…], subject to stringent restrictions." Wait, what?

Pronounced "deny."

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