There seems to be two NSAs in the media right now: the extremely competent one that can access your email from a desktop without any oversight or trouble and the bumbling idiots who don't know more about terrorists than reporters.
It doesn't mesh.
It doesn't mesh.
IME, that's the norm in large organizations.
>The Peter Principle is a proposition that states that the members of an organization where promotion is based on achievement, success and merit will eventually be promoted beyond their level of ability.
The organization acts like a completely incompetent being, despite all interations with it being competently handled.
They present themselves as harmless and benign, offering re-assurance and smiles, while being from questionable to insanely violent with some unpleasant agenda behind those smiles. Initially deal with a mafia, and it all smiles and pasta. Behind the scenes, its a different story.
So yeah, the NSA and he government are trying to present a Church of England tea and cakes at the afternoon garden party type of image. Of course they are. Meanwhile the people questioning this setup are trying to present an image people need to be worried about. The media then just present these extremes, and the citizens are expected to pick a side. As both sides become increasingly extreme, the issues loses credibility and gets swept aside by the next big news splash. while the relatively few people who actually care eventually disperse wonder what the hell just happened. This is the exact same pattern we see on almost every issue. Where is Occupy now?
This issue's only real relevance is as another example of the broken bond between those who govern and the people. And Im not sure there ever was any such bond. Lets face is, the government is basically the formalization of the rule and maintenance of the powerful over the population. There was a balance, they did used to realism they had to keep us broadly happy, in order to keep their power in place. But I think now, they are so arrogantly confident in their manipulations that they no longer care.
Heh, its like the old saying: No matter who you vote for, the government always get in.
But they haven't... They've made it clear that they are a potent force that fights the evil terrorists. No part of the NSA response has been smiles and cakes. They're calling for Snowden's blood and telling America that this is serious stuff.
Of course they are. He called the cops on their illegal party.
Organizations are basically groups of people; it's entirely possible that some people in an organization are more competent than others. There could be extreme differences in the level of competency. Or maybe some people are competent in some areas (e.g. the technical details of surveillance) but lack competence in other areas (e.g. common sense). This could be even the case amongst the key decision-makers of an organization.
That's probably what we have here. A very sophisticated surveillance program that siphons data from all the major networks, that also misses 99% of the communications it was designed to catch because that last 20% of implementation isn't worth the expenditure.
Somehow the organizations that align with one's ideologies are painted as efficient do-gooders in a horribly inefficient and bumbling system, while the ones that align with opposing ideologies are capable only of a incompetence at a level usually reserved for high comedy.
I think ultimately it comes from this notion of "the" government. It is easier/lazier to assume that government is a monolithic entity rather than a large organization of people, therefore complex and not at all monolithic. Since people are used to this sort of treatment, it becomes a nice dramatic vehicle for people to tell stories and push agendas, and it is so ingrained, people rarely say "hey wait a minute..."
Just for fun, pay attention and call people out on it sometime. The anti-jackbooted thugs rants and law enforcement needs more money (from the same person) crowd is pretty common in tech - note the switches in perceived competence, and position, and call people out. The mental gymnastics of retaining the position are awesome. Seriously, if there was an olympics of cognitive dissonance, people who like US politics would win the gold every damn time.
To be fair, the thing you described sounds like they're doing they're jobs, but that they're also idiots, so it actually makes sense to me.
The jack-booted thugs are "the government", the ones being ordered around by Godless Communist Obama; they are taking away our guns while intentionally giving guns to Mexican gangsters and black panthers, using the IRS, preparing the Peace Corps as a Marxist militia and sending drones to kill Americans just for opposing him. No incompetence, just pure and concentrated tyranny and malice intentionally resulting in the apocalypse, because Obama and his supporters literally hate America and are literally violating the rights of Real Americans and literally preparing to exterminate them.
The ones who should get funded are types who will support us, particularly right-wing groups like Oath Keepers and militias, who won't comply with the Obama agenda and will help us defend ourselves from Obama's tyranny and restore the glory of America as a Christian state, as the founders intended. This isn't "the government," but rather "the people."
Obama and his supporters are winning right now by treachery (a brainy kind of competence) and support from archvillain "elites" like George Soros and almost every college professor, but in the long term they are corrupt and weak; the strength and purity and common sense of Real Americans will win and the cancer will be purged.
It's a complete picture.
With this level of spying infrastructure and the poor oversight of agents and admins within the NSA, corrupt usage of this technology is effectively inevitable.
I am sure both organizations would admit that the scaling up just pre ww2 wasn't handled very well.
Ironically Moscow center thought at one point that the famous 5 where some super devious plan by the security services.
What about Facebook? I think we could all name things they do which are brilliant, and things that are... not so much. How much worse would it be without the market to discipline them, with official secrecy to cover their every mistake, and limited to the pool of engineers who can pass a security screening?
The picture I get of the NSA is that the poles are just more extreme. Large scale architecture is done by someone like Binney, and then there are thousands who are like Snowden, with marginal academic credentials.
Basically, if you can glean information on the clever ones by the exposure offered by the bumbling ones, then this is an obvious indirect way to track the competent ones. Not only that, but it assumes the competent ones are always 100% competent and never make a mistake.
As they say in the SE world, it's a signal. One of many.
In the UK we've had some weird private courts (where NOT EVEN THE ACCUSED KNEW WHAT THEY WERE ACCUSED OF (caps because really come on even I think that's bad)) and in the US I guess the intelligence is passed onto to other agencies who then claim the arrests and other evidence is used for convictions.
I know that NSA and GCHQ have very smart, capable, people working for them. I have no doubt that if GCHQ wanted to get access to my hard drive they'd find it trivially easy to do so. Whether those people are allowed to operate at that kind of level (because of oversight or internal politics or they're just doing different work) is another matter.
The NSA can competently access your citizen-grade e-mail, that's it. When it comes to real terrorist communication, they are bumbling idiots. They are wasting their time and our money.
This implies two options: the NSA really are idiots and don't know this (unlikely), or they are well aware of this but are using terrorism as an excuse to do the surveillance anyway.
The NSA can do sigint, and data mining. Every problem requires lots of data, and if they have enough raw data they should be able to predict anything and everything. So the politicians give them more data, and the resources to process it.
I only meant that portrayals of the government, particularly on HN lately, sometimes seem to assume that it's some kind of ultimately corrupt, death-dealing junta that will put you on a blacklist for just thinking about them, or a useless bureaucratic morass. I wasn't intending to make a value judgement on anything. I probably shouldn't have used the word 'truth.'
>seem to assume that it's some kind of ultimately corrupt, death-dealing junta that will put you on a blacklist for just thinking about them
I haven't seen anyone call them a junta, otherwise, it's not without precedent, you know. Hell, the FBI's headquarters still proudly bears the name of its most disgraceful former director (37 years!), who directed every kind of activity we find antithetical to liberty and justice.
see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
and especially, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO#Post-COINTELPRO_ope...
Actually, probably yes. Almost always.
But again, Kylekramer was suggesting it seemed odd for these two contradictory portrayals of the NSA to exist. I was just suggesting that there was no real contradiction, because people can tend to resort to extremes to advance their point.
There seems to be no reason in itself to believe that the truth is between two (arguably) suspicious portrayals, and merely splitting the difference won't lead us closer to any truth.
"The fact that one is confronted with an individual who strongly argues that slavery is wrong and another who argues equally strongly that slavery is perfectly legitimate in no way suggests that the truth must be somewhere in the middle."