NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Are you fucking kidding me? Let's take this incident to the most die-hard scaremonger out there and ask them how the hell is it in the interest of national security to hide it when government institutions are found guilty of breaching the Constitution?
Further, let's assume that you were an every-man (as we all are) and had the ability to type anything into a magical console that spat out private details about US citizens. That would be an "unreasonable search and seizure", so you wouldn't do it, right? It's logged! How many of your fellow citizens would not do that search? But the NSA doesn't just hire anyone, so you have to assume the folks aren't exactly like your fellow citizens and they know they're being logged. But is your guess "0"? I've seen people delete ("sudo rm -rf /some-important-dir") critical bits of infrastructure when they knew logs were in place, so my guess is most certainly not zero.
Note: I know some 3-letter-agency folks and they are very tight-lipped, so I don't want to suggest 3-letter-agency folks are not entirely trustworthy. But the NSA appears to have an incredible honey-pot and it't hard to imagine that no NSA analyst would have a taste.
Note^2: the NSA should have internal honey-pots to catch analysts browsing their (girl|boy)friends and such, but I'd not be surprised to hear that they don't...
The NSA could literally fund itself entirely by simply trading against the information they have access to.
Baseless accusations like that will get you nowhere.
Wasn't the issue that the app displayed the YouTube videos without the advertisements though, and this was against the Terms of Service?
Google would be remiss if it wasn't trading against the massive wealth of data it has. They're probably not mining email (though they could use a proxy and look at the frequency of particular ads' being displayed in Gmail), and probably have a privacy line, somewhere, that they're unwilling to cross. But I'd be surprised if most people ended up being comfortable with that line's placement. And it's not like we have any way of knowing where it is.
Here, first time ever you can find out who visit White House!
http://youtu.be/OXWTdTnhebs?t=12s
EDIT: In case someone did not notice, I was being sarcastic.
Here is more related clip: http://youtu.be/EpLWCvIZDuI?t=2m
https://www.eff.org/document/doj-status-report-re-releasing-...
Don't let my facts interrupt your rant, though.
>in response to the unauthorized disclosure of classified information, the government has declassified certain information concerning intelligence collection pursuant to Section 702
>[the government] further provides notice [...] that it has determined it will release to Plaintiff a redacted version of the [FISC] opinion previously withheld [but requests a delay]
It's only because the EFF requested it (after Snowden's disclosures) and fought for it in court that the finding of unconstitutionality will now be made public. Or rather, whatever parts the government decides to let go of.
>That distinction would mean more if it didn't literally come on the heals of them explicitly trying to suppress the entire court decision.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5982741
No idea why that merits a hellban if that's the reason why.
Considering their track record with honesty, why should we believe this was an accident?
Mr. American Terrorist Contractor can't have all his communications tied to a single identity that could be reassembled with Big Data. So he tries to keep very few traces of his activity, and confuse snoops with false leads and dead ends.
Mr. American Terrorist Contractor called from many phones, used many addresses, etc. The dragnet to catch him must be large. It will include some innocent Americans. Tens who called a phone he called that same day. Hundreds who went to the same deli as he went last Friday. Add more situations, area codes, phone call graphs and quickly you have most Americans.
That's by design, though: you can't have surveillance that's capable of catching domestic terrorists without surveilling innocent citizens, and you can't try to end terrorism with surveillance without spying on the people who will actually perform the terrorist acts in your land.
EDIT: As it currently stands, the NSA is supposed to help end terrorism by spying on all foreigners. What I'm arguing is that surveillance of non-citizens always leads to surveillance of citizens. Some Americans are uncomfortable with the US government spying on American citizens, but comfortable with the USG spying on foreigners. They may be less comforted when they realize how, if the real intent of the surveillance is to prevent terrorism, only spying on foreigners won't help much.
Any plan with that as its stated goal, is a stupid one.
To play with the idea of Swiftian irony, destroying the privacy of non-Americans to protect America from threats real or presumed may work... in the same way selling the children of the poor for meat would solve certain problems.
" if it wants to end or prevent terrorism through
surveillance."
Clearly, no US citizen could ever be a terrorist.
</sarcasm>
How does reasoning like that ever make sense? I just can't accept that EVERYONE working for the NSA is a moron. Thus, there must be other motives. Think about that.
If the NSA were so brilliant, they wouldn't need to borrow from Google, it'd be the other way around:
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/nsa-accumulo-go...
I wonder if he realized what that implies.
Aren't criminal counts per action? not per-percentage? WTF.
"Your honor, I only stole 0.00000512% of this bank's money. I should get off with time served."
"Your honor, I was only distributing 0.00000125% of the city's weed. I should get off with time served."
"Your honor, I only murdered 0.000000004695% of the population of the US. You look at a number in absolute terms that looks big, and when you look at it in relative terms, it looks a little different."
Be sure to read the bottom. Hilarious.
We were not paranoid enough. I was not paranoid enough. You were not paranoid enough. Reality outstripped our imaginations. How are we going to recalibrate our expectations? What's next?
...that is, assuming these aren't being done already.
What would occur is mass ostracizing and general social chaos from imploded relationships (friends, lovers, family). There would be shocking and boring skeletons, it would become a giant cultural witch hunt, pleasure would be taken in socially mocking and assaulting people with the most outrageous or abnormal skeletons. We live in a bankrupt culture that worships tabloids, gossip and low value entertainment (low value everything in fact, including food, just so long as it distracts for a moment). I see no reason to think people would suddenly change the way they go about the world: the averages for what is considered scandalous behavior would simply shift and there would be a new unlimited supply of people to be socially assaulted. Why just look at my boring skeletons compared to that guy! My scandal is nowhere near as bad as hers!
Beliefs, and the deceptions that maintain them, are more properly understood as self-fulfilling prophecies; prescriptive ideas, masquerading as descriptive ideas. I have a serious concern that if we magically evaporated every single lie, and therefore every belief, we would disintegrate back into "nature red in tooth and claw".
Our capacity for aspirational imagination and social climbing through deception is as every bit baked into the history of human evolution as our empathy for those like us, or our care for child-rearing. It is, in Stross's term, a wicked problem.
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
- Vonnegut
Unfortunately now twisted, this lesson from 9/11 stares back at us in the mirror like a nightmare. Social engineering and conditioning were manipulated by the terrorists, too. The lesson is don't be naive. People can do some ugly things. Especially when they abuse positions of trust and basic norms of civility.
We'll see after the next election. If a whole bunch of incumbent security hawks and war hawks aren't unseated by civil libertarians, then we're probably out of chances.
It would help if they aren't also crazy in their own right.
As Jimmy Carter says (as buffoonish as he might have been), we don't really have a functioning democracy any more in the US.
"The most serious incidents included a violation of a
court order and unauthorized use of data about more than
3,000 Americans and green-card holders."
In another case, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,
which has authority over some NSA operations, did not learn about
a new collection method until it had been in operation for many
months. The court ruled it unconstitutional.
Actually, "moral hazard" means:
> moral hazard is a situation where a party will have a tendency to take risks because the costs that could incur will not be felt by the party taking the risk. In other words, it is a tendency to be more willing to take a risk, knowing that the potential costs or burdens of taking such risk will be borne, in whole or in part, by others.
We probably want less of that.
If I download terabytes of Wikipedia XML dumps, could I argue to my ISP I never actually downloaded any "data"?
"To be clear, that was only an audit spanning 12 months, May 2011 to May 2012. There may have been more violations by NSA before and after.
Also, this audit only covers NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters and other facilities in the Washington area."
> Three government officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, said the number would be substantially higher if it included other NSA operating units and regional collection centers.
The real issue that must be resolved and is still not being addressed is:
As long as these NSA activities are not dismantled and the People do not have transparency over what the NSA/government does, everyone of us can still be "eliminated" by the push of a few buttons and democracy therefor no longer exists.
Even if its decline happens slowly and behind our backs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog).
If only this kind of communication could have a known location, like say, its origin tower. Maybe I completely misunderstand the phone protocols, but I thought origin tower was hard to miss.
But be honest, he's never going to do that... Obama is just as involved as the chief of NSA.
To allow these abrogations of our civil rights to go unpunished equates to tacit approval, and I, for one, absolutely refuse to let this matter rest until the violations cease and those responsible are duly punished to the full extent of the law.
Secret courts handing down secret rulings regarding secret police is not something one would expect of a nation which claims "moral high ground" when justifying their breach of the public trust on multiple fronts.
Some of us swore an Oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, and we take our vows with deadly seriousness.
I'll see myself rot in some prison before I allow this situation to be shuffled off the collective radar.
So what are you doing about it?
> I allow this situation to be shuffled off the collective radar.
Voting up articles about the issue on a niche news site is not "doing something".
Keeping this issue alive and at the forefront of the collective mindset is doing something.
I didn't assume that, I asked.
> Keeping this issue alive and at the forefront of the collective mindset is doing something.
Not really. Everyone here knows about the issue and has an opinion about it already. I would really hope that, like you, most of us have acted on it (I called mine rather than writing), but it's a pretty small group, all things considered, and basically an echo chamber for issues like this. To really do something, people need to "get out of the building", to borrow a phrase.
I'm sorry, I'm in a bad mood. As an European, all I can do is upvote these articles and donate to the EFF...
A lot more than someone saying "let's not talk about this", that's for fucking sure.
Voting up articles about the issue on a niche news site is not "doing something".
And answering to your own post isn't really "making a point". Who claimed that's enough? Who claimed it's even a lot? How is it not better than neither doing something, nor talking about the problem?
jister was obviously being sarcastic. In kind of a facile way, I suppose, but I guess it went completely over people's heads.
> How is it not better than neither doing something, nor talking about the problem?
Because it apparently lulls some people into thinking they have done something meaningful. Talking about it endlessly here accomplishes two things: jack, and shit.
This is absolutely untrue. The longer it is kept in the public consciousness, outside of a government frame, the better. Talking about it with your grandmother is useful.
HN is not the "public consciousness".
(Of course if you were just diffusing the "We're such a important and powerful part of the world" type of attitude that seems prevalent on reddit and seems to be implied by pessimizer's comment, go for it)
And this is worse than not even wanting to do something meaningful, or anything at all? Nonense.
Talking about it endlessly here accomplishes two things: jack, and shit.
Talking about it "endlessly" is just another strawman, right now we're talking about discussing it at all, vs. discussing it not at all, because realizing in what belly people live is not interesting enough for some.pond.
If talk achieved nothing, corrupt authority throughout history including today, wouldn't be so fucking terrified of it, they would dare to shut up for a second, and let the "narrative" unfold itself, instead of being dictated. The emperor is naked, and collectively realizing that is not only half the battle, it's 90%. Unless you're suggesting to go off and just assassinate people, which would backfire, I don't see what one could do without talking about it: Before anything can be done, people need to be aware, and once they're aware, what will be done will also depend on them.