Newly disclosed papers give rules for NSA surveillance without a warrant

It's not that encrypted information is itself suspicious. If a communication is encrypted, the NSA simply can't tell if it's a legitimate foreign target intercept or some inadvertently picked up communication until the NSA is finally able to decrypt it. Were it not so, foreign targets could evade the NSA by encrypting their traffic and making it appear that it might be domestic material (for example, routing it though domestic email accounts), forcing the NSA to discard it.

Just as security researchers look for every possible loophole when creating attack scenarios, so the authors of NSA regulations seek to close any possible loophole a target could use to evade intercept. The NSA has to assume that its internal rules will eventually be leaked (as has just occurred) and used against it by a foreign enemy.

I'm guessing Snowden would have been less likely to come forward if Wikileaks and related events hadn't occurred first.

In his notorious guide to ruling, Machiavelli advised Princes with bad news to deliver it all at once, noting that no matter how bad it is, people will adjust and move on if they feel that's the end of it. Good news, on the other hand, should be judiciously doled out, in small amounts, to maximize the value it brings the person delivering it.

Conversely, if a Prince has good news, and delivers it all at once but with no follow up, people will stop being grateful for what they've gotten, and will start demanding more, which can bankrupt any ruler who tries to comply. Likewise, if there's a steady drip of bad news, minds race ahead, anticipating worse to come and making advance preparations which undermine the stability of the Prince.

This basic psychology works the other way as well. If you have bad news about your adversary, and drop it all at once, they can take the hit and move on. But if you can supply a steady drip of negative stories it becomes impossible to get past the growing sense of distrust, especially when people start imagine the worst, and demand to see proof that their darkest fears are unfounded. This may mean having to prove a negative, which is the epitome of an impossible situation. Reaching this point only accelerates the downward spiral.

Of course, following this strategy means being able to place yourself beyond the reach of retaliatory efforts. It's what Sun Tzu would refer to as selecting the field of battle to play to your strengths while offsetting your weaknesses. If your chosen position also has the inverse effect on your opponent, neutralizing their strengths while amplifying their weaknesses, then it's a double win.

So far, Snowden's strategy has been textbook-perfect.

This is my understanding. Greenwald has also been letting politicians say one thing for just long enough before he publishes documents to the contrary. Or, in the case of the most recent leak, confirming what politicians have said about storing data for 5 years, but including more information about how analysts choose targets, which has not been officially disclosed.

Agreed. So far, it's working quite well, and is quite clever. I think I would have probably published the documents in this order as well.

It's telling that yesterday's document showing Eric Holder signing off on warrantless surveillance came days after Barack Obama reassured us it wasn't happening.

Does not this D-notice gag order also apply to Guardian/Greenwald? What's up with that?

While the president is overseas.

They are UK centric only on outside appearance. Notice how we have given intelligence agencies unlimited powers under the very simple condition that they can not spy domestically? It works the same way in the UK.

So the way this works is that the NSA will spy on Britons, the GCHQ spies on Americans, and everyone comes together to exchange notes.

The simpler version is "People who are trusting X without proof that they aren't lying, are being really naive."

In God We Trust, All Others We Monitor

What I'm shocked about is that newspapers haven't outright printed in the front page headline "such and such a person lies to congress and the american people about NSA wiretapping". Every time a public servant lies to the citizens they are supposed to serve, it should be the headline on the front page.

ah, "due process" vs "do process"

>I suspect it's out of an honest attempt at doing the right thing.

no. It is to cover their asses. Like in the case of torture - if they just go and torture it would be one thing, instead they have been doing it according to the rules reviewed and approved by government lawyers, who declared the torture is legal. Thus people have been tortured, yet nobody can be punished for performing it. Nor people who only wrote the [illegal] rules, nor people who only followed the [illegal] rules. Using such responsibility deflection schema government can do anything as long as it follows "the rules" [which it wrote itself] and even the people with moral compass can look in the mirror easy because they only doing their job and follow the rules.

(another example - recent public outcry about drone killing of Americans was easily put down by switching attention to the alleged fact of existence of the "strict designation and targeting rules" the government follows without even publishing the rules, just a mere statement of their existence)

Their moral compass may not be in line with the rest of the country. Some people when afforded the power to eavesdrop on anyone can and will focus on what they percieve to be existential threats. Existential is the key word. When Hoover focused on Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, he viewed them as existential threats to the United States. We today viewed that as extremely misguided, but at the time he and many others in power agreed that we should monitor and debase those "existential threads". The industrial food lobby considers animal rights activists existential threats. The administration views journalists as existential threats to their ability to defend against existential threats. Defense spending proponents think people that are anti-defense spending to be existential threats. The fact that the NSA is heavily Mormon, means that many people in the NSA may hold the same opinions about existential threats as the Mormon church. Many fundamentalist churchgoing folk consider gay marriage to be an existential threat. It is precisely because every individual has different views on what are and are not existential threats to the United States that we created a Bill of Rights that protect against the prosecution of existential threats that are merely the opinion of one individual and not the collectively opinion of the citizens of the United States.

The entire system of checks and balances was created because of this distrust of the "moral compass" of any single individual or signle in-group. When an individual or in-group can unilaterally monitor the communications of other individuals or in-groups with out due process, it all starts to fall apart.

There should be no secret court. There should be due process. There should be court appointed warrants not rubber stamps. This is all more important than what any one individual thinks is necessary for them to do what they think is their job. Their job isn't to catch terrorists. Their job is to catch terrorists without violating that principles of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. If they are doing the former at the cost of the latter they are failing at their job.