NSA Disruption of Stock Exchange Bomb Plot Disputed
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We could put a video camera in every home that can't be turned off and has a direct feed into the local police station. I'm sure that after a few months, the police could then point to all the crimes they'd discovered as a result.
Success rates are not the only consideration when determining whether or not we should give a particular power to the government.
Yes, the easiest way to do something might be to violate the Constitution, but that doesn't mean it's the only way.
Let's take the worst-case disaster scenario: Terrorists are going to get a nuclear weapon and blow up a major city every year. Millions of deaths per year.
Here are two ways to prevent this:
A) We read everyone's private correspondence without prior suspicion and arrest anyone who we think has obtained nuclear materials necessary to make a bomb. Obviously if we hadn't arrested them they would have killed millions of people, so reading everyone's private correspondence without prior suspicion has saved millions of lives per year.
B) We track down and secure all the nuclear material (e.g. what the Russians have lost) using traditional investigative work so that terrorists can't get it. Since it's too hard for them to make themselves, this prevents them from obtaining a nuclear weapon, problem solved.
C) We send undercover operatives into terrorist networks and disrupt them before they ever get off the ground.
You don't need A if B works. You don't need A if C works. You don't need A if any of D through Z works either.
1) Conserve energy through efficiency.
2) Develop renewable energy technologies.
3) Invent cold fusion.
Sure, we might not need 1) or 2) if 3) works, but without the existence of 3), it's very easy to make a case for 1) and 2).
And of course by the time that runs out, we'll have something like Planetary Resources up and running...
So while 3) might not ever happen, that does not imply 1) or 2) are the only remaining options. Proof by elimination only works if you can prove for all options, not just your preferred subset.
The public's tolerance of any privacy infraction probably depends a lot more on how scary the stories of potential harms used to defend it are than the actual harms that it has prevented or would be likely to prevent in the future.
Imperial Japan made the very same mistake in the lead-up to American entry into WWII. They knew of the industrial capability of the U.S. but figured that with hard enough blows in a quick enough time that they could negotiate a settlement in their favor.
What happened instead was that Japan ensured that American public opinion would support their defeat and ensured it would be essentially unconditional, no matter how long it took and however much it cost.
And if I may turn an argument around for a minute, maybe the lack of Gestapos in the U.S. is a culture of widespread and well-founded skepticism of government power. If we let down our guard then plausibly there will be more Gestapos (as there have been in other, less skeptical countries).
Also, authoritarian governments are far, far more damaging than any individual attack could be. When a government goes wrong it can destroy the lives of its entire population for a generation or more and literally kill millions of people. You can't compare 1:1 the count of individual attacks on a country and the number of times that something like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia has happened. They're on completely different scales.
I have never claimed people should let down their guard. I've claimed that people should actually think and reason about an issue and then make a decision, instead of setting up easy (and flawed) rules for hard problems.
I'd be worried if people weren't initially revulsed by stories about government reaching the traditional line at which we declare civil liberties most important. But just as we've moved the line closer to civil liberties and farther away from state power, I don't see how it's automatically totalitarian to even think about moving the line closer to state power if there are actual benefits to be gained and without corresponding higher risk.
Unfortunately it's hard to even debate that here; even where you can get people to agree that it might be possible to consider a risk/reward analysis, they usually take incredible liberties in the logic process.
E.g. the "50 plots foiled; still no details story". It's like, really... you don't think there even 1 possible plot that could only have been detected by grabbing the unencrypted message data from G+/Gmail or Facebook? If someone can't even bother to think critically about aspects contrary to their chosen end state then how can I trust them to debate using critical thought?
I didn't trust Glenn Beck when he tried to use OLIGARHY as a debate tactic; I'm not going to trust people on other issues when they use poor logic either.
Not so fast now. That isn't the only question. Suppose for sake of argument that getting unencrypted data from Google or Facebook was actually a successful method to foil some nonzero number of those plots. The question remains whether that was the only or least intrusive way to stop them. And unless we have the details, we can't make that determination.
[1] At least at the upper end of the speculation. I don't have a good handle on the true situation as I don't trust those who fully know to tell me straight.
[2] The ability to gather metadata, listen in, record and analyze communications means that they are not private even if they are not all listened as we don't know that they are not being monitored.
[3] Defined by the annual US casualty figures due to terrorism.
"Solving unsolved crimes is a noble objective but it occupies a lower place in the American pantheon of noble objectives than the protection of our people from suspicionless law-enforcement searches."
This isn't suspicionless searches. At least the querying of the data isn't.
The biggest question here is whether having the info but not looking at it is the same as not having it for the courts. That'll make or break this program.
""" Q. Can analysts listen to content of domestic calls without a warrant?
A. NSA likes to use "domestic" as a weasel word here for a number of reasons. The reality is that due to the FISA Amendments Act and its section 702 authorities, Americans’ communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant. They excuse this as "incidental" collection, but at the end of the day, someone at NSA still has the content of your communications. Even in the event of "warranted" intercept, it's important to understand the intelligence community doesn't always deal with what you would consider a "real" warrant like a Police department would have to, the "warrant" is more of a templated form they fill out and send to a reliable judge with a rubber stamp. """
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-n...
Oh, wait. They totally do that. Nevermind...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02...
Re: "can we do it" --
The 4th amendment protects the right to be free against "unreasonable searches and seizures." Not all searches, not monitoring, not tracking. Unreasonable searches. To a lawyer (like 30-35 of 55 framers of the Constitution), "reasonable" is a signal to balance competing interests. That's what it signals now, that's what it signaled 200+ years ago when the Constitution was written.
So in the context of the 4th amendment, that is exactly the right argument to have. Whether a law enforcement tool is effective and necessary is a fundamental question you have to ask in balancing the competing interests of law enforcement and privacy. And that balancing is inherent in deciding whether a search is an "unreasonable" one.
Re: "should we do it -- it is self evident that a determination of whether a technique is effective and useful is instrumental in deciding whether we should use it.
NB: I'm not a US Person so I don't know the finer points of your legal system.
The constitutionality of the search follows from whether the law the search complies with is permitted by the Constitution.
The Constitution asks: "is this search unreasonable?" So, to answer the previous two questions, you usually have to confront the reasonableness question first.
A cop can pull you over for swerving on the road for suspicion of DUI, even though he/she has no definitive proof you are drunk - and it may very well turn out you were sober.
This does not make the stop unreasonable.
A search that does not lead to charges is a false positive, but a false positive is not in and of itself indication of reasonable-ness.
In this case, it should be! Keep in mind the kind of evidence they were working with.
And nobody's talking about traffic stops, but call me crazy when I say I think terrorism should entail a slightly higher standard than that.
Which is the precise argument that the other side is making. When we special-case terrorism we're no longer on solid ground - whether it's in favor of looser or stricter treatment.
So, here's the thing: the level of false positives, when calculated in aggregate can suggest unreasonable enforcement. If 95% of all searches yield nothing, there is a legitimate question of whether or not your targeting is reasonable. This is the primary legal argument being used, for example, in the ACLU's case against NYC's stop and frisk policy.
But a single case of a false positive, with no further information, cannot be taken as evidence either way. The fact that the Wall Street plot may have been a false positive sheds no light on whether or not the suspicion was reasonable in the first place.
I think you're making a category with respect to traffic stops, though. It's not "law enforcement" at the point the searches are being done in the context of surveillance, and I'd argue that meatspace comparisons here are inapt on the whole. The level of inquiry through surveillance would be comparable to a LEO having reasonable suspicion of something, then downloading your GPS history and searching your car after you leave it at your destination (imperfect, but close enough for internet debate).
That is certainly a legal use of "reasonable", but I don't believe it's the one used in the 4th Amendment.
The word "(un)reasonable" is not describing how a decision is made, as used in the expression "reasonable person", which means "someone who uses such qualities as attention, knowledge, intelligence and judgment which a society requires of its members to protect their own interests and the interests of others.”[1]
In the 4th Amendment, "reasonable" is describing a disposition or action derived from or based on examining and validly inferring from evidence, as in "reasonable belief", where it "considers whether an officer acted on personal knowledge of facts and circumstances which are reasonably trustworthy, and that would justify a person of average caution to believe that a crime has been or is being committed..."[2]
Without evidence on which to base belief (suspicion) that a crime has been or is being committed, a search is ispo facto "unreasonable", and therefore unconstitutional, regardless of any benefits to interested parties.
My 2 cents, IANAL, etc.
[1] Barron's, cited at http://www.answers.com/topic/reasonable-man
[2] Barron's cited at http://www.answers.com/topic/reasonable-belief
That said this discussion is very important because many people see things in terms of an overall tradeoff -- between security and privacy; or the amount to invest in different kinds of security. No matter whether we think of it that way, many others do. So it matters a lot if all the government's own examples of "success" are not in fact significant successes.
Also, with the current oversight mechanisms many of the government's statements come down to "trust us". When they are seen to be spinning something like this so blatantly, it erodes trust on anything else.
The entire system is continuously pushing us into this state of mind that they can protect all and each of us. And you know what could be the safest place? Prison! I mean, organize it properly so inmates can't fight with each other, lock every one up and viola!! That would prevent lots of kidnaping, deadly car accidents, any type of accidents, even lethal lightning strikes. You gonna prevent lots of dead. Its worth locking every one up; I mean if it can prevent one dead, then its worth it...
Let's try it again: Obama advocated gun control legislation using the argument that if it saves one life it's worth it.
These days politicians mix that word into a sentence with anything or anyone they want gone, and the public supports the cause, for fear of their own safety. The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is strong.
But every now and then I like to think back to the original definition. By which it would seem that the United States' response to terrorism has been exponentially more terrorism.
Were it not for all of these shenanigans maybe we could have all healed from 9/11 by now.
This thought created a particularly deep reaction in me.
I'm not sure which civil liberty they'll strike down next in the name of preventing future attacks. Their means-to-an-end attitude exposes not only hysteric, irrational thinking, but a fundamental misunderstanding of the Constitution.
(Jokes aside, though, I understand your comment and agree that we shouldn't let terrorism paralyze us with fear, as it's intended to; plus, the risks of an American being killed in a terrorist attack are very low.)
Well that's troubling.
Does any investigation which used data from the NSA, especially early in the investigation to obtain warrants and more data suffer from a 'fruit of the poisoned tree' problem, where much of the evidence used later could be declared inadmissible on appeal?
Has 'trying to be helpful' on the part of the NSA and/or FBI poisoned thousands of convictions?
Meanwhile, it's the method of prevention that should be disputed, not the fact of it.
I love that. It captures downtown Manhattan perfectly.
Sean Joyce, modern day Iraqi Information Minister. Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Saeed_al-Sahhaf
My details were slightly off, but close enough.
The crossover is probably not even close to being reached, but discussion about it is certainly relevant. Many people believe they'd be under major attacks without these secret program. Dismissing their claims doesn't further the discussion.
In all probability, there is no credible threat. That's why they choose to do this stuff without consent, and why they've been blocking the courts from ruling on it for years. And this is more of the same -- more manufactured bogeymen, more obfuscation. They want to talk about anything other than their lies and their crimes.