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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

Think about how the NSA helped stop all the killings and maimings at the boston bombing.

Oh wait, they didn't - from two super stupid criminals not even trying to hide what they were planning.

So WTF good are they doing for all the damage they've done to our society.

NSA has become just like the TSA, completely useless theater that hassles everyone and accomplishes nothing.

Just wait until they can park hundreds of drones over every city and track everyone's movements historically, forever - the logic will be you are in public so no warrant needed or there will be yet another secret warrant for the entire country.

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Apparently they stopped some other bombing (though it's pretty hard to convict a criminal guilty purely on intent).

I think it just comes down to the trade off of freedom vs. loss of life.

I mean that's what it's really about, isn't it? We are giving up the freedom of privacy for the potential of more security?

Yet, This is not the American Way

At one point we realized that in order to protect the freedoms of our people we had to die. That's why so many fought in the revolutionary war. To protect our rights and freedoms as citizens against the State (England, at the time).

If we just lay down like dogs now and let our government walk over us like dogs, all those lives will have been wasted.

The last bombing that was announced that they stopped, it was the FBI spoon-feeding all the ideas and materials to the "would be terrorists" and nagging them to death until they started to put a plan together.

So I'll believe that they stopped something when they produce the details for the press to investigate.

Or maybe they didn't:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/public-documents-contradict...

It's more complicated than "freedom vs. loss of life" because any "protections" necessarily have costs and unexpected consequences. So what ends up happening is even more terrifying than a direct freedom vs. lives trade off would be in theory.

For example, if TSA being onerous convinces a significant number of people to drive for their medium distance trips instead of fly, more people will die because driving is more dangerous than flying.

Also, it's not exactly a 1-to-1 comparison, but for every 700,000 hours(ish) you force people to wait or delay their day in some fashion, you're causing an entire lifetime of inconvenience. It's better than taking an infant from its mother and shooting it, but it's still taking an entire lifetime of potential and destroying it through boredom and frustration.

I know I'm leaning pretty heavy on TSA examples here, but we've also seen they can't even reliably stop weapons from coming through security in predictable and repeatable ways. So, "we" decided that a trade off between security and freedom was prudent, we implemented that trade off, and then we found out we only received the downsides and none of the upsides.

They've been busily locking folks up over here in the UK for the last year or so for life sentences, just for talking about plots - no action whatsoever.

Precrime is already here and nobody is batting a damned eyelid.

The Financial Times has called this the data intelligence complex, by analogy with the military-industrial complex. It's a government--private sector alliance that's spending $80bn yearly on spying on citizens with questionable returns. Can you imagine "how many jobs would be destroyed" if this were to stop?

We shouldn't forget how much $80 billion actually is.

For that amount, they should be saving in the order of 40,000 people's lives from terrorism a year to justify the spending.

(I've plucked the intervention per life-year saved from here: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/UCSBpf/readings/inter...

and assumed each life-save has 50 potential years of their life left)

While I see your point, generally speaking law enforcement is not going to spend a proportional amount of money with respect to protecting citizens. Hundreds of thousands of dollars may be spent on a single investigation into a murderer that may only prevent the deaths of 1 or 2 people. You can't assign a monetary value to it. Protecting people from dying is a necessary service in any society.

If the NSA had a hypothetical program that didn't infringe on anyone's rights (likely impossible, but bear with me), but did consistently stop terrorist plots when they arose, even if all of the successful plots may kill a few dozen or a hundred people in total, most people would agree that spending $80 billion on that program is worth it due to the lives saved.

I don't personally think that $80 billion being spent to protect lives is wasteful, generally speaking. I do see how it is wasteful in this situation, because it has very questionable results, and when the collateral damage of the plan is so incredibly great.

Select bias. You don't know what they did stop.

I'm sure they have plenty of proof ready to share with the public, to prove that the system is worth it, even though it's unconstitutional, but apparently no one cares about that and about American values anymore:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Etm4dHdaApo

Or to explain that and how they stopped a threat might reveal how much they know, who their informers are, what type of codes they can break, and hence make it hard to stop the next one. If you tell Bad Guys™ (a) that and (b) how you stopped a previous attack, then the next set of Bad Guy™ will know not to make those mistakes.

"They" knew that the "Ft Hood shooter" had been in contact with extremists, yet we all know what the end result there was.

    13 dead
    30 + wounded

This is extremely counterproductive. You aren't going to get anywhere simultaneously bemoaning the damage caused by extremist acts and the excesses of the NSA.

When you point out the failures of the NSA to stop specific instances of terrorism, it only suggests that they need more resources and legal surveillance. The reasons for wanting the NSA surveillance to stop have to be that the innumerable injustices suffered by citizens under a surveillance state would be worse than the occasional extremist attack that would be preventable under such surveillance.

No, that's not what he is saying at all. With the maddening amount of resources ($80 billion for fuck's sake) spent on surveillance of both foreign and domestic communications, incidents where the agencies have the resources and intelligence to stop attacks but don't/can't shows that no amount of money spent or rights lost will give us absolute safety.

Yeah, it's weird what our existing civil liberties are able to prevent out intelligence agencies from doing.

If it were the Stasi, Gestapo, or NKVD that noticed an Army major communicating with a Resistance element for any reason you'd have been able to count the remainder of that major's life in hours. FBI, on the other hand, went "Meh, not enough evidence to start an investigation".

So be careful about the conclusion you draw from that. All you've really said is that we currently have handcuffs too tight on the NSA and FBI.

I don't think so. Any BS success they would advertise to high heavens.

Which is the same nasty logic as if you have nothing to hide routine.

Well ... the day after Osama was killed it was all in the news and all positive. If they stopped something on similar scale they would not have reasons to hide it.

This is silly. It is impossible to know how many other bombings have been stopped because of intelligence gathering attempts. In fact since 9/11 I've been extremely surprised at the low number of terrorist acts which have subsequently occurred, although maybe I was just wrong to assume how frequent / easy they would be to carry out.

There are much better reasons to oppose this than "To me it looks like they didn't stop every attack so it is useless".

Your corrective is well taken. The "Didn't work, did it!" response obscures the real dangers. These enthusiasts for blanket surveillance should be asked to consider "Who watches the watchers?". One answer is: you never know.

To me it's a bit like maintenance: You only notice it's there when it doesn't work.

Like someone else said, we have no idea how much crap they actually catch, maybe the boston incidence is just one instance out of many others that were prevented.

Then it's in their own interest to publish a few numbers from time to time.

Good point, I haven't really checked it out any more than a google search, but it would be interesting to see if they actually published any numbers at all.

Could we even trust the numbers? It's like, if they lie about the system existing, what else is fair game?

We have no idea what they actually did prevent, and a single case where they failed demonstrates little. Further, pointing out the failure in the Boston bombing is a poor counterpoint given that to many it would suggest that increased surveillance is necessary, not less.

I'm not American, so I can't really speak to the domestic angle. I am immensely concerned about the foreign angle, however -- if the US government can secretly demand information from firms like Google or Apple, that is extremely concerning from an espionage perspective (economic or otherwise). Every government of Canada employee involved in the F-35 procurement process (or the Keystone XL pipeline, or any other multinational discussion), for instance, hopefully don't carrying Android or iOS or Windows OS devices (back when Obama carried a Blackberry, a Microsoft rep pointed out how dangerous this was having the president carrying a foreign device. Every other nation on Earth needs to heed those words). Even if communications were end-to-end encrypted, simply knowing where each of the people were and who they communicated with -- without knowing the contents of those communications -- would provide simply enormous data to effectively flank any position.

It is ironic to look back to when Chinese firms like Huawei see great suspicion, when we know that the free and democratic United States may be just as dangerous.

>>We have no idea what they actually did prevent

Ugh.. what terrible reasoning. The absence of data is not somehow possible data.

>pointing out the failure in the Boston bombing is a poor counterpoint given that to many it would suggest that increased surveillance is necessary, not less.

It's actually a rather good counter point. It shows that the FBI/NSA/big brother already can't process all of the data it has in a meaningful amount of time. How does adding more data to sift through help? Unless there's some benevolent, magical AI that can pick terrorist patterns out of a colossal sea of data, I fail to see how more data is the solution.

The absence of data is not somehow possible data

When you don't HAVE the data, it is nonsense to make conclusions as if you have the data, which is exactly what you and others are doing. Terrible reasoning indeed.

shows that the FBI/NSA/big brother already can't process all of the data

Once again -- no data (you have absolutely no idea what data they have or don't have), but you can declare that the problem is processing data.

There is a trend here.

> When you don't HAVE the data, it is nonsense to make conclusions as if you have the data, which is exactly what you and others are doing. Terrible reasoning indeed.

When you don't have the data and the data is kept completely hidden from you, the only reasonable course of thought is to assume that the data does not exist or is completely and totally flawed. When the NSA or gov't asserts that its data collection is protecting you, they must provide the evidence so that such a statement could be examined. If they do not provide such data, you can't assume anything about its existence or even its existence in the first place.

you have absolutely no idea what data they have or don't have

Well, that's not really true:

The FBI has confirmed that Russia alerted the agency in 2011 that Tsarnaev had ties to 'radical Islam' groups in his homeland. Homeland Security sources have also revealed the agency received tips in 2012 about his ties to extremists connected to a Boston mosque. (...) Tamerlan was said to have been named as one of the radicals that came to attention of an informant working with an agency attached to the Boston-area Joint Terrorism Task Force

maybe it shows that they don't have ENOUGH data ? that is also viable viewpoint

just saying

>We have no idea what they actually did prevent, and a single case where they failed demonstrates little.

And that is the problem. Zero accountability to the very populace they are taking liberties away from.

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