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Comment by LoganCale | Hacker News Reader

> In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt

Considering their track record with honesty, why should we believe this was an accident?

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Suppose you're a Foreign Terrorist. If you're planning an attack on the US, can you do it entirely from your country? At some point you have to contact some people in the US to carry out the attacks. But oh, the Americans you hired are very wily, and they know that, to be relatively anonymous and have their shenanigans hidden, they have to call from different phones, send emails from different accounts, use different identities, encrypt everything...

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.

How about we just give up on "ending terrorism"? Two attacks by foreigners in 250 years of history is ABSOLUTELY NOT WORTH the bullshit we're being put through as a country. This shouldn't really even be up for debate.

You cannot end terrorism at all.

Any plan with that as its stated goal, is a stupid one.

Its a good thing that all terrorists are foreigners. (or rather, all foreigners are potential terrorists).

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.

The FBI is meant to deal with domestic terrorism. The NSA's remit is foreign signals intelligence.

Please tell me this is Swiftian irony and you are playing Devil's Advocate for the sake of conversation.

I wouldn't call it Swiftian irony, but I was trying to expose how the USG has to spy on Americans if it wants to end or prevent terrorism through surveillance.

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."

TBH I just want them to end or prevent terrorism through good old fashioned detective work and only rely on surveillance into private spaces when they have a warrant issued by a court.

A real, non-secret court, with the warrant targeting individual people, with probable cause, without the ability to start surveillance days ahead of getting approval.

I was thinking this. I wonder if they also happened to get the 20 country code calls in addition to the 202 calls. Do they have any quality control on their code?

you'd think they'd at least disallow three-digit area codes.

I have no doubt that their entire surveillance apparatus is layer upon layer of barely-working garbage code.

It's why they have to copy all of their technology from the private sector, or have it provided by the private sector. The government can't do anything well, much less software product development.

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...

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