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Comment by sehugg | Hacker News Reader

Remember when the Secret Service visited the 13-year old boy at his school regarding a Facebook post? http://abclocal.go.com/kfsn/story?section=news/national_worl...

What about Justin Carter, a 19-year old recently freed on $500,000 bail for another Facebook post?

So we know that Federal (and State) law enforcement spends resources following up very tenuous leads.

As far as burning sources and methods, what else would you have them do to follow up on this specific lead? Six agents interviewing someone for an hour seems less expensive than weeks or months of surveillance.

What does it matter if the account is true or false? It's completely plausible.

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You're not following. Yes, Bayes says that following up on stupid Facebook posts is also a waste of time. But the cost of following up on Facebook posts is low; nobody is surprised that the FBI finds out about stupid threats you post to Facebook, because Facebook is essentially public. The cost of following up on a Google dragnet is very high; the whole artifice of the Internet surveillance program is that it's not used this way.

Note that I'm not saying that Internet surveillance data doesn't get used this way. I'm saying that when it does, the USG sure as shit doesn't advertise the fact. They don't burn sources and methods for no good reason.

It's almost totally implausible.

You're overestimating the competence of government.

No, I'm not.

Incidentally, I love the mentality that says that the USG is using optical splitters to record all the traffic on the Internet, built a data center sufficient to archive it, built the database technology sufficient to enable the entire NSA and FBI realtime access to that data, compromised SSL CAs, but is too dumb not to tell strangers about their secret programs on random visits.

It's like in the movies, when the evil mastermind has the hero tied to a chair suspended over the laser shark tank, but monologues long enough for the hero to find a way to escape.

Believe what you wish. Your mind is already made.

That's because the data has already been seen. (Did you expect "You're overestimating the competence of government" to change anyone's mind?)

> but is too dumb not to tell strangers about their secret programs on random visits.

The group of people that are doing this random visits are not imbued in the same culture of secrecy as the NSA. Furthermore, the larger a program, the more and more casual a group of people are going to be about protecting it. It's the fault of our social programming -- if nearly everyone I deal with on a daily basis is in on a secret, I am far more likely to share that secret. This is probably the reason that nobody talks about their own secret projects at the NSA.

Your line of reasoning was what I used to assume about the type of NSA style data collection: "Gathering and using data information about every American would be an immense task, requiring lots of people -- if such a program existed, we probably would have found out about it now."

It turns out -- we are finding out about it for precisely that reason.

Apparently at least one FBI counterterrorism agent did this very thing, on national television. I think you are seriously underestimating FBI agents' big mouths.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/07/tim-clemente-fbi_n_...

http://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/going-dark-lawful-electron...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/28/fbi-surveillance_n_...

Edit: Note that this was well before the PRISM leaks.

The FBI confirmed the officers who paid a visit were county police, not FBI agents: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/01/new-york-police...

Which makes me wonder, how do county police get access to a reporter's search history?

They probably got the tap on the shoulder…

You're picturing the organization as a single mind and mentality when it's composed of many thousands of people with many motivations and levels of competence. The agents on the ground aren't the same as those who build the fancy technology (and in this case the agents who visited the author of the blog post were from a completely different organization).

This is how spying works in general--find one of the inevitably many people in a secret organization who will, in the right compromised situation (alcohol, a romantic affair, etc.), brag about their knowledge of state secrets.

Or look at Bradley Manning, who among other things exposed the fact that low level operatives have access to far more secret data than one would have imagined. His motivation (which led him to release all the data) differed from the organization's overall motivation in an extreme way.

I love the mentality that says that the USG is [doing complicated technical things], but is too dumb not to tell strangers about their secret programs on random visits.

That's not a mentality, that's being aware the USG consists of millions of people, exactly the opposite of

It's like in the movies, when the evil mastermind has the hero tied to a chair

The cops in question were apparently local members of a Joint Terrorism Task Force. They get these tips from "the government", check them out, the people are once again not terrorists, and they then talk to them freely like normal people, because (1) they are and (2) the cops aren't NSA, don't have training in this kind of secrecy and don't care, and (3) do pretty well by classifying people into sheep and goats without worrying that some of the sheep might be cleverly disguised goats or have goat friends.

So yeah, this part of the story is entirely plausible to me.

Thomas, the sane HN readers have stopped venturing into the NSA threads. You've made a valiant effort, and its charitable of you to keep the truthers distracted from attacking other threads, but it's time to leave them behind.

Not to pick on you, but this meme is so grating to read over and over. "Government is incompetent" is an easy, lazy narrative that distracts from the immense complexity that is government (especially the US government).

Government is neither competent nor incompetent. It is a vast collection of organizations composed of humans that vary from grossly negligent paycheck collectors to shockingly effective strategic geniuses. Bureaucracy is the friction inherent in the system; different people clog and lubricate its workings to different aims, which range from the purest altruism to the most cynical abuse.

A government may be incompetent in solving issues in the interest of their constituents, but these people are cream-of-the-crop professionals at accumulating power.

What artifice? Edward Snowden has removed the need for the government to pretend that kind of thing isn't done.

No, he didn't. That's an Internet meme, not a revealed truth. The USG may very well be abusing SIGINT to profile the whole US population, but it is not true that they're doing that openly.

Oh, "internet memes," such pesky things! Why, every time there's a new Chuck Norris joke there are congressional hearings and amendments being debated! Such trouble! And remember that last time someone posted a cute cat video, and congresspeople made statements left and right (some of them even validating what the cat video said)?

My my, what trouble those "internet memes" get us into.

You sure did a lot there to avoid refuting his point (and avoid saying anything substantial, I might add). His point is that the actual abuse hasn't been documented, and they surely wouldn't do it in such a silly way as this article suggests if they were abusing it in this manner.

I was annoyed at the condescension of "internet meme", and was commenting on that.

When the clear potential for abuse has been thoroughly documented, getting nitpicky on actual abuse seems like a waste of time.

Of course, were I to get nitpicky, I'd say there is documented evidence of abuse (with NYTimes reporting going back years): http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130731/16193324027/nsa-bo...

EDIT: I do believe there's a difference between the potential for abuse and actual abuse. But I further believe the potential for abuse from global surveillance is so significant that even the potential is a dire problem in its own right. I was a bit too flippant about that distinction above.

Didn't the NSA just admit the existence of XKEYSCORE in a press release? [1] They pretty much verified much of what the Guardian had reported, while denying widespread, unchecked analyst access to data. And this blog post reveals a "foreignness factor" which would justify the search.

1. http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/press_room/2013/30_July_2013....

This does seem implausible and I understand why. This program couldn't last more than a couple weeks, right?

But 2 things, neither of which are solid, can't rule it out (for me): if all search engines are monitored, what does it matter if the sources and methods are revealed? The adversary won't have much use for that information, unless they stop using the Internet altogether. It's a dumb argument, sure, but I could see it used as justification.

Second: does FBI leadership think a program like this could have prevented Boston? If they think this program is a good idea, I would not put it past them to run it so openly. Security theater works best when everyone sees it.

If I was organising security theatre, I'd probably ensure the (first? only?) person I targeted was a freelance journalist who'd accidentally acquired a million Twitter followers too...

Why is this even a debate about expense? Even if it cost the government $0 to store data on all americans and send agents to search peoples homes and question them it would not make it right for them to do it.

This is a basic question of what freedoms individuals have. If you make the laws so complicated and or secretive that no one can comply with them then the entire system fails. You have 3 letter agencies running around selectively enforcing overly complex/secret laws then the very foundation of what the law is meant to do breaks. Selective enforcement equals political influence equals the Rule of Men, not the Rule of Law.

>Why is this even a debate about expense?

Because the thread of this conversation is plausibility, and the OP article lacks a great deal of that, as pointed out by tptacek. Nobody here is arguing that this surveillance is correct, only that the sequence of events in the story makes no damn sense.

Burn sources? That cat is already out of the bag. Everyone knows what's happening. I bet the leaks are incredibly liberating to intelligence. They no longer have to maintain the facade and can actually use their data to the full extent.

So we know that Federal (and State) law enforcement spends resources following up very tenuous leads.

Approximately 18 years ago I had 4 local police show up at my front door at 11:00 PM because my roommate had broken up with a girl and she told her parents that I posted her phone number on a Prodigy message board. I didn't do it and have never even had a Prodigy account.

I also barely knew the girl and she was only doing it to get back at my roommate through me.

I was in bed when they knocked on the door, I went downstairs and didn't let them in. They threatened everything short of killing me, I told them I had no idea what they were talking about. They then grilled my roommate outside for about 20 minutes. Dumbest situation I've ever been involved in.

So yeah, local cops have way to much time on their hands.

What does it matter if the account is true or false?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection

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