U.S. Government: Reports About PRISM Contain “Numerous Inaccuracies” | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Government: Reports About PRISM Contain “Numerous Inaccuracies”

techcrunch.com

158 pointsLightning29 comments

> The unauthorized disclosure of a top secret U.S. court document threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation.

> The article omits key information regarding how a classified intelligence collection program is used to prevent terrorist attacks and the numerous safeguards that protect privacy and civil liberties.

The dissonance between those two sentences, which appear consecutively in the statement, could not be mores striking. "Transparency damages your security! Yet your lack of information makes us seem unreasonable!"

So convince us! Don't hide behind a wall of unconvincing secrecy and then tell us it's good for us. We're the People; we're happy to decide how much you can spy on us for the sake of our security.

You know what I think? I think you kept this all a secret because your case for doing it utterly sucks, and you knew we'd object. And I think you've earned precisely that level of trust.

Edit: minor expansion

I love their circular logic: "The disclosure of our illegal spying threatens our illegal spying in the future".

Hey at least they don't use the "we don't tell you we're spying on you so we don't infringe on your privacy" line, anymore.

These comments go to the top, along with FBI's last year's quote "Warrants make our job hard" i.e. check and balances make their job harder, which is kind of the point, I think.

Put yourself in the spooks' position. You may know for a fact that parts of the story are simply inaccurate, but you're sworn not to reveal unclassified material without authorization, and you can't know for sure how good the criteria for classification are due to compartmentalization.

Only a few people, like the President and the DNI, are in a position to make those determinations, and they're in a somewhat similar double-bind insofar as selective declassification may later turn out to be a mistake. If you talk to a lot of conservatives, you soon find that when the administration increases transparency or answers a FOIA request with meaningful information, there are plenty of hawks ready to criticize the administration for compromising security, putting American lives at risk, and so on.

Oh those poor spooks. What are they to do! Life must be rough for them; we should be more considerate.

I'm not asking you to feel sorry for them; I'm just asking what you would do if you had their job. Saying you wouldn't take that job is beside the point; they literally don't have the option of explaining themselves fully. The number of people who are empowered to declassify information is very small in comparison to the number of people who are empowered or mandated to classify it.

If I were a spook, I would throw myself under a bus.

Barring that, I would just keep my mouth shut if I were in an unprivileged position like that. If I don't have permission to declassify it, what business is it of mine to say that the public does not have the full picture? I can't imagine even saying that much isn't frowned upon. No, I imagine any official statement to the effect of "you don't know everything" is only authorized very carefully.

There is no real "partial explanation" option here. There are only full explanations, and unverifiable PR spin. Nothing in between. Unverifiable PR spin is the only option? Tough shit, I am not satisfied.

If I were a spook, I would throw myself under a bus.

Are you saying that you don't believe that governments (at any level) should engage in any kind of intelligence-gathering or espionage, ever? Or that there is ever any role for secrecy? If so, I regard that as a valid position, but also a naive one.

Being a spook is incompatible with who I am. If I were forced to be a spook, "drafted into spook-dom", I would do anything necessary to end the coercion. If necessary, I would throw myself under a bus. I believe this to be a principled response to coercion.

Actually on second thought, that is short-sighted. I would leak everything that I could, then I would throw myself under a bus.

If you are asking me what I think spooks, who are not me, should do in this situation, then I think I have answered that. They should either expect the criticism they will receive for their worthless PR spin responses, or they should respond in a way that would not cause such a reaction. I don't care if they think the later is not an option, or even if it actually is not an option. That is their problem, not mine.

Shitty position for a spook to be in? They don't have any other options? So fucking what. They made their bed. Criticism of what they said should not be tempered just because you think it is the only think they could say.

OK, but what about the question I asked? I get that you would never voluntarily go to work for the NSA, CIA, or similar, but my question is whether you think organizations like that should be allowed to exist at all, not whether you would choose to work there.

I'm pointing out a practical limitation on what they can say arising of how such agencies function, you're talking about how they should feel about it on a personal level. I have no interest in how they feel about it as individuals.

You are saying that they cannot release everything. I am saying that I don't care, I will still criticise them for a piss poor response even if that is all that they are capable of giving.

If I require something of them that they cannot provide, I do not stop requiring it of them. If they cannot satisfy me, I will remain unsatisfied. I will not change my standards to accommodate them.

I've answered your question now three times. Are you going to pretend not to hear me again?

So basically you're just throwing a temper tantrum. It seems to me that your problem is with the way these organizations are constituted by law, but your reaction is to make moral criticisms of the individuals who work there and are trying to operate within the law.

I think in this case that there are strong arguments for changing the law, but it seems utterly pointless to blame people for following it when that is what they are sworn to do.

oh the melodrama

What do you mean by this comment?

I don't know if the GP is saying that, but I certainly am. Perhaps it's naive but the problem is; the government simply can't be trusted with this level of power. Every time a government is giving these kind of powers they do something corrupt/evil with it. So better to not have it at all and face the consequences than to keep having shit storms like this current one popping up all the time.

Full transparency in government, consequences be damned.

>I'm not asking you to feel sorry for them; I'm just asking what you would do if you had their job.

Quit and get a decent job?

>* Saying you wouldn't take that job is beside the point; they literally don't have the option of explaining themselves fully.*

That's kind of begging the question. It's like asking "what would you do if you were a drug dealer?".

>The number of people who are empowered to declassify information is very small in comparison to the number of people who are empowered or mandated to classify it.

Err, that's a PROBLEM, not a situation they are OK to have to work with, or people have to put up with.

>Put yourself in the spooks' position.

Ok, I instantly resign and go become a monk or something, hoping I have enough time left in my life to make up for all the negative karma and evil I've built up.

If "numerous safeguards that protect privacy and civil liberties" does not include a judge and an actual warrant with the person's name on it, then there are no safeguards.

This type of abuse has happened before (see FDR for a bit of history), but not on the scale technology has enable.

Reading it carefully, what they are saying is this:

    The press is complaining that we are spying on Americans.
    This is very inaccurate.  We are mostly trying to spy on
    foreigners.  We have a robust legal framework in place, 
    rubber stamped by the Star Chamber (aka FISC) which 
    protects your liberties.   The fact 
    that the media reports did not report on our secret
    procedures makes the reports grossly inaccurate.  
    Please trust us. kthxbye

> It cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States.

"Intentionally" is a weasel word. Clapper also used the word "wittingly", another weasel word, when questioned by Congress.

The takeaway: They still don't deny that they're collecting the info.

"oops, this just happened to fall into our pockets

finders keepers!"

What worries me most is that they don't even deny spying on foreigners. With so many international websites and services located in the US, what does that mean for us in Europe? What difference do our European privacy laws make, if we use websites with servers in the US?

The NSA's primary mission is to look at foreign communications. The controversy that is erupting here is because that mission inevitably involves surveillance of US data centers

I've wondered for a while now why a European company would do their hosting in the US. Surely everyone knows by now that the US is one of the worst places (outside of NK or China) to host, why not host somewhere that doesn't have these issues? You're worried about latency? Then just get rid of half your facebook/g+ buttons and call it good.

Okay, NSA, so how about some transparency to clear up these supposed "inaccuracies"? Nobody believes you if you just deny something without providing evidence to back it up.

Take it to the courts.

The only way the NSA/FBI/Obama administration are actually going to give up any hard evidence is if compelled to.

The EFF is certainly attempting to do just that: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/confirmed-nsa-spying-m...

>U.S. Government: Reports About PRISM Contain “Numerous Inaccuracies”

Yes, that would be the case for any leak of "in the dark" government activity. It's not like everything is out in the open to be reported upon freely and in detail. As long as they got the gist right, I'm covered.

>The unauthorized disclosure of a top secret U.S. court document threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation.

How is the use of "top secret U.S. court documents" not a threat to the very idea of democracy itself? And a threat to the people from such covert activities?

Why would any foreign company or government do business with a US company any more. All your secret belong to US.

The idea that PalTalk was a top-tier data collection target up there with Google and Facebook does stretch credibility. I'd never even heard of them before.

(Alternate theory: the slides are an awesome marketing hoax by PalTalk.)

How does this, in their response, not confirm the PRISM info in at least some way? Or am I meant to take this as "any confidential info is potentially dangerous"? And even then, are they admitting this is authentic confidential info?

>The unauthorized disclosure of a top secret U.S. court document threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation.

>The article omits key information regarding how a classified intelligence collection program is used to prevent terrorist attacks and the numerous safeguards that protect privacy and civil liberties.

And that's exactly the transparency we're interested in. Help establish a bit of trust, because right now I trust the least trustworthy person I know more than the NSA.

And their last defense is FISA/FISC and they're still pretending that only applies to foreign nationals? Or is "only meant to be used on... foreign nationals"?

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