NSA Chief: Terrorists Using Leaked Info [video]
nbcnews.com
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The fact that that alone and the potential consequences are now (slowly) sinking in to the public consciousness made these leaks more than worth it.
That debate needs to be had and it needs to be had in the open, the hypocrisy of politicians (Merkel comes to mind) when they address the subject is telling.
That 'terrorists' (who are these guys anyway, didn't you mean criminals) are using the leaked info is a statement of fact which is hard to falsify (terrorists won't own up to it) and probably even harder to prove so it should carry very little or no weight at all.
I wish this was true. I don't think it's there yet. I virtually hear nobody outside of tech talking about it. It's really quite remarkable.
I'll tell you what, though: young people are absolutely paying attention.
And members of the Judiciary Committee seemed genuinely surprised by the scope of these programs. They were obviously fed a line of bullshit from the past several administrations about what these programs actually do if they were told anything at all. That fact isn't particularly comforting since these programs have been hinted at publicly for years and anyone who has been paying attention understands what the intelligence community is up to.
If you read Hayden's op-ed in CNN last week you'll also see evidence that the tech companies and the backers of TPP are two forces having the big impact on the debate right now since he addressed both issues right up front.
We are a long way from getting meaningful change, but it sure looks more likely now than it did three months ago. And there is more coming on this story. For example, Greenwald says he has NSA training manuals that prove that NSA analysts have the technical ability to tap communications from their desk just like Snowden said they do. Right now the administration is hiding behind the fact that they are restricted by policy from doing that, and many members of the Judiciary Committee seemed to be confused by that. They seem to believe that analysts don't have the technical capability when the admin says "they can't" do it.
Also, even Cheney seemed genuinely mind boggled by the fact that a low level contractor has access to the details of these programs. He insisted that he must have had the help of a higher placed source to get access to the documents he leaked. People really don't understand how computer networks work and what it means to be a system administrator.
I believe the NSA is specifically calculating that it's better to delay and appear to put up a "fight" over releasing this info. Then, when it finally comes out, it will have the psychological effect of making people think that if the NSA is fighting so hard to protect something so "trivial", then maybe there's nothing to worry about. Maybe all of their programs and activities are just as "trivial". So, nothing to see here. Let's keep it moving.
But, of course, the specific number of a certain type of request for a small number of tech companies is only a small part of the picture with respect to this overall issue. So, ultimately, such a limited release would work in the NSA's favor.
I watched the entire Judiciary Committee hearings and they were more than just the normal political posturing. There was a lot of that of course, but there is an undercurrent of deep concern that congress has been had by the executive and judicial branches. That is a good thing. The more documentation that comes out, the more likely there will be real change. Especially if Congress becomes convinced that thousands of analysts across the intelligence community have the technical ability to bypass any legally required procedures and do what Snowden said they can do, and that the technical auditing of that access is less than complete. Looking at the architecture of the system that the NSA has built, and hearing that the number of system administrators with access similar to Snowden's is in the "hundreds", then I suspect the truth is that there are hundreds of people who have total access to all the data the NSA has and that they can access that data in a way that would be very hard to detect unless someone in command was looking for a specific case of abuse. And even then, how could you trust the audit trail when at some level at least some system admins have to have full access to that data too?
But that will not really solve the global problem for the tech community since Congress will never prevent the NSA from monitoring foreign traffic. It will be interesting to see how Google handles encrypting Google Drive. The only hope they have of gaining back the trust of international users in the long term is to make it easy to ensure that this sort of wholesale surveillance is much less likely to bear fruit. Google has conflicting incentives in this area though since they want to be able to read the content to serve relevant ads.
I still think it is highly unlikely that we'll get any real reform. But I have more hope than I have in years, and that is great.
At the end of the day, we need more tech like Tor. And we need the tech community to actively resist restrictions that governments will always want to place on the effectiveness of such systems. I personally would like to see a requirement that data centers in the US must allow users to host Tor relays and exit nodes on their networks without hassle or restriction. That is unlikely to ever happen, but that would go a long way in really protecting users since it would allow users to fund a network that would actually protect their privacy. At a minimum, there needs to be legal protection for users who do choose to host relays and exits. Short of a requirement that all DCs allow Tor exit nodes, as a community we need to actively support companies that allow users to host Tor exit nodes. And we should set up a legal fund to fight any battles that result from the hosting of relays and exits.
On the other hand, you would think he would say so if that were the case.
Perhaps you are right, but some are stopped because of intelligence. It could be that the bad guys are getting more sophisticated, even though there are still lower-probability lone-wolf types out there.
But people die in all sorts of preventable ways. Dropping the national speed limit would save hundreds or thousands of lives. So would nutritional subsidies for kids, or all other sorts of things we could spend our political capital on. But those things do not have the same broad support as anti-terrorism measures, because the public is not willing to pay the cost, even though more lives are at stake.
You could say our fear of The Other comes from Bush's fear-mongering, or the shock of 9/11, or a genuine clash of civilizations, or just human nature. But whatever the origin, that irrational fear is the real root of our disproportionate reaction to the theatrical murder called "terrorism".
Our culture has been conditioned to be afraid by reflex, and it has to end. The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.
Neither of those expenses has its desired outcomes, nor are they mutually exclusive.
Fine I'll bite. Where is this evidence?
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811753.pdf
Around page 6, a little under 10K fatalities in 2011 somehow involved speeding. (about 1/3)
Around page 7, 87% of fatalities involving speeding were not on interstate highways. So about 10% of about 10K is about 1K people died from driving "too fast" on the highway.
Around page 7, around half of drivers who killed someone while speeding were drunk. so about 500 people were killed by sober drivers who were going over the current speed limit. Drunks are going to kill someone anyway, no matter what the law is. You can consider this a fixed constant death rate regardless of speed laws.
In other words, if you raised the speed limit such that no one ever got cited for speeding during a fatal crash, aka we go total full motion autobahn, about 500 people would die legally instead of illegally.
Of course a lot of this involves police high speed chases, driving too fast for conditions, suicide by car, road rage, mental illness, stuff like that. I feel confident that out of a total sample of about 500, a realistic change in speed limit up to perhaps 75 would probably kill at most 100 people. I think this is a overestimate, but feel confident it would not actually turn out to be 10x higher.
This analysis pays no attention to the death toll from increased car exhaust fumes due to reduced mileage, or increased soldier death rates in the middle east due to needing to burn more oil, or any of the other secondary effects, which may very well be greater than the primary death toll, I really can't estimate those very well. For example, if you raised the death toll in Iraq by 20% on both sides to get 20% more oil, that would swamp the relatively minor increase in death toll on the interstates back home.
This helps you identify political axes to grind... someone claiming "10" or "zero" is obviously distorting reality in one direction, and "100s" is obviously equally distorted in the other.
Frankly I wouldn't be concerned. The odds of death by lightning are about 1 or 2 orders of magnitude higher. The odds of death by poor diet are around 5 orders higher. Death by poor exercise habits, probably the same around 5 orders higher. Higher highway speeds are not a very serious threat in the big picture of risks. I'd worry a lot more about "not talking a walk after dinner" or "drinking too much corn syrup"
Thanks for the details though. :)
It's also telling how clumsily he's stumbling over his words. Whether Obama fears speaking freely for political reasons, security reasons, or just plain deception is something I can't answer.
(And obviously, much of what he's saying is demonstrably false, or at least misleading. But it also wouldn't surprise me for the NSA to be misinforming the President.)
Which results in more election campaign funds for a politician, funding a new constituency of child fondlers at airports, or administrative fooling with speed limits?
One interesting analysis of speed limits is do people drive to live or live to drive? If, conservatively, one billion person hours per year are wasted sitting in a drivers seat, and increasing speed limits 10% caused a reduction in wasted human potential of 10% aka 100 million person hours per year, and an average remaining lifetime of a typical driver is far less than a million hours, then if less than a couple hundred extra people die per year due to the higher speed, total loss of human potential would be lower at higher speed, despite the somewhat higher death rate, which is somewhat counter intuitive.
"conditioned to be afraid by reflex"
Cowardly. No sense tiptoeing around it. America is a nation of cowards. Very heavily armed, dangerous, and violent, but none the less fundamentally a nation of cowards. A strong man with a gun is an asset to everyone around him; including himself. A shivering coward with a gun is a danger to everyone around him including himself. We (as in the whole world) are not in a good situation.
I never fail to be impressed at how brave the .uk people were during WWII and during the IRA troubles, at least contrasted with the Americans. Despite the supposed special relationship between the .uk and .us. Maybe the .uk men could send us whatever makes them so comparatively brave, tea or soccer or monarchy or whatever it is.
Couldn't agree more. Far too many chickenhawks.
Paradoxically, I think it's because we are so comparitively safe. The slightest threat to that safety (real or otherwise) bursts the bubble, and is a shock to our veil of normalcy, as opposed to the "shit happens" outlook in parts of the world where danger is more frequent. (I wonder if those who live in the worst inner cities, surrounded by gang warfare, waste any time worrying about terrorism?)
But in fairness, those flames have been pro-actively fanned for decades by government and business alike. It's near-impossible to realize how pervasive the propaganda machine is here unless you go out of your way to detach yourself from it.
Greater than what? The last 1 year? 2 years? 5 years? 100 years?
Are the terrorists changing their tactics? Probably. Is it going to do them any good? Unlikely.
The shining example that pops up is the Boston marathon bombing. If the NSA, with its vast dragnet couldn't catch two amateurs, does anyone really think it would catch someone who actually knows how to pull of a bombing?
Boo Fucking Hoo.
"We have concrete proof that terrorist groups and others are taking action, making changes, and it's gonna make our job tougher."
Although the lead-in mentions that intelligence collection has been hindered (in the past tense), Keith Alexander is only willing to say that it will be hindered in the future.
Just as concerning as the programs themselves are these kinds of idiotic arguments that their proponents make to justify them. I'm not hugely keen on trusting someone who can't avoid extremely simplistic logical fallacies in his reasoning to oversee the surveillance of all humanity.
I really don't understand why this isn't a larger issue
However, the security services of the US, Russia, China, India, and various European nations will also get this data, as will assorted criminal organizations.
Maybe, just maybe, enough lay people are used to using "Google" to query a mountain of crap (the internet) to find a few interesting nuggets that they realize the government could do the same.
Step 2: getting people to realize how badly this can go when correlation = causation, and you are guilty by association.
If enough people have changed their behaviour as a result of the surveillance / nascent police-state scandal, then this statement is statistically plausible, so I am not calling out "B.S." just yet - although the usual warnings about rampant language-lawyering apply as per normal.
Oh, well that makes me feel safe...
Careful folks, come high karma folks here will accuses you of trite anarchy for these comments.
"The reason we use secrecy is not to hide it from the american people, not to hide it from you, but to hide it from those who walk among you who are trying to kill you."
... well in that case, please take my rights and the rights of my neighbors if it gives me a little temporary security.
I am funding them afterall, and there are far more useful things that can be done with that money. We have a completely failing country in all facets aside from the military industrial complex. All military funding needs to be drastically cut.
Fear-monger much? What can you not justify with this line of reasoning? "Well, we're not herding you all up into concentration camps because of anything you've done innocent Americans. We're putting you all there because of the evil Americans who walk among you."
If we buy the mindset that the "evil-doers" are indistinguishable from innocent Americans, then we will allow virtually anything.
And, is this overt paranoia inducement even remotely justified? I mean, really, what percentage of the so-called terrorists are "other Americans that walk among us"? For that matter, how many "terrorists" are really out there?
But, this is a subtle, insidious, and very purposeful shift. It's an example of how they've moved the goalposts and are increasingly morphing these "terrorist-tools" into a hyper-surveillance program to keep tabs on all Americans. There was a time when they'd have to justify their actions and abide by Constitutional protections by pointing to foreign involvement in monitored communications. The line was that they are not monitoring us, as much as they are monitoring those foreigners who happened to be talking to us. Now, he's allowing that Americans are specifically being targeted domestically, but that it must be done because the terrorists "walk among us".
Also love the way the story frames the NSA activity as more benign and highly targeted:
"[a program that] gathers data on numbers dialed and length of calls, though not call content, and another that allows the NSA to monitor overseas e-mails and Internet sites used by suspected terrorists."
Makes it sound highly targeted and less invasive to innocent Americans. But, we've already learned how they get call content, that the distinction between foreign and domestic communication is less meaningful than we originally thought, and other details that go beyond the benign characterization of the story. This story seems to be stuck in the days before so many more revelations came out.
They left out all but the "This message brought to you by the NSA."
I was intrigued by this question and wondered the same. I created this Google spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhTjVTjz9GpldFJ...) with the estimated strength of all groups listed here: http://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/crt/2011/195553.htm#ano. As of 2011, it would appear that the US government has calculated there are approximately 50,000-100,000 terrorists worldwide. I did not include the names of the groups in the spreadsheet, but I went top-to-bottom through the list and recorded the "Strength" of each group and put it into a cell. Unfortunately, the estimates are almost entirely vague and nebulous (probably intentionally), so I was very generous in my calculations. The spreadsheet is world editable, so I invite any contributions.
For scale, according to Wikipedia and this site: http://www.citypopulation.de/USA-California.html, all terrorists in the world identified by the US government would fit in a city between the size of Novato, CA (50K population) and Boulder, CO (100K population).
According to the DoD budget here (http://comptroller.defense.gov/defbudget/fy2014/FY2014_Budge...) we have spent $1.5 trillion dollars on "Overseas Contingency Operations" since FY2001. Taking that data into account, we have spent $17 million for every single known terrorist in the world since 2001, at a rate of $1.2 million per year (14 years).
According to this: http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66 we spend $10,694 per year on pupils in the US public education system.
Are there any people out there who happen to know off-hand how much money the French government spends per person on healthcare?
(Sometimes, I think the U.S. started to commit suicide in 1981, though, with the advent of Reaganism, but that's a slightly different discussion)