Time for Answers from the NSA | Hacker News Reader

Time for Answers from the NSA

nationalreview.com

80 pointst0dd12 comments

The establishment is veering completely off the rails:

Former NSA director Mike Hayden, in a speech to the Bipartisan Policy Center last week, dismissed the nation’s most outspoken transparency groups and privacy advocates as “nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous twentysomethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years.”

I speak to my wife on a daily basis (too much, she says, especially at parties -- yes, we go to parties, and we get invited back too!), and I deeply care about privacy, so Mike Hayden is slightly wrong. Oh, and I haven't been a twentysomething since the Clinton administration.

This is from a magazine founded by William F Buckley, Jr. Quite possibly the conservative antithesis to Noam Chomsky. The only people in favor of these programs are those who gain power from them through the imbalance of information they provide.

Buckley was old CIA material. His superior in the CIA was E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate burglary fame. NR has rarely strayed from its intel roots.

If The National Review is annoyed at the NSA, it might indicate a small tip in the scales.

That might be true, but if it has gotten to this point, I'm more inclined to think that we really haven't see anything yet… after all do people think that these capabilities, that they have worked so hard on in secret and outsourced to companies owned by some of the largest/most influential private equity groups in the world, will just be given up easily?

I'd be willing to bet even 10% of people within NSA are against the current scale and scope of domestic operations of NSA. Certainly >30% of the rest of the IC, and probably >50% of DOD and non-security parts of government (random NASA guys, etc.)

To the extent that federal government employees tend to be more educated and informed (since they're professionals) than the public as a whole, employees of the federal government are quite possibly more against these programs, at least at their current scale and scope, than the general public (and certainly the voting population, who skew old and paranoid and white and rich).

"...I additionally believed that one of our best defenses against the national security state was the perennial proclivity of clandestine organizations to piss off their own employees."

-J. Orlin Grabbe, 1995

http://peculium.net/2013/04/03/the-end-of-ordinary-money-by-...

That is why automation, cloud computing, drones, etc are terrifying. Once bad activities take only a very small number of read in personnel to accomplish, it is a lot easier for them to do worse stuff for longer.

You'd think any of them with a brain would have twigged that collecting all this data is completely stupid because it is so dangerous. Of course it will get in the wrong hands sooner or later. If they are collecting enough data to make files on everybody, organised crime would have a field day nobbling juries, and blackmailing businesses and law enforcement for a start (let alone the political ramifications of foreign services and bad actors being able to pressure those in positions of influence). When you think about it, this kind of data collection is completely antithetical to national security.

It seems safe to say that most of the tens of thousands of NSA employees, even technical ones, don't know the true scope of their agency's actions. (Our Congressmen apparently didn't know, so why would the worker bees be any better informed?)

This would be a huge problem for me if I were one of those employees. The Edward Snowdens that the NSA should be truly afraid of are the ones that still work for them.

Coming from the NR, this represents a real (albeit small) addition to the growing chorus of concerned voices.

And it only increases my respect for the leakers' strategy of releasing new information bit-by-bit: it allows a parade of NSA apologists to concoct a fresh new excuse for each revelation, then look like the untrustworthy puppets they are once the next abuse blows their ad hoc rationale out of the water.

We know what they'll say: its limited, necessary, etc. But the answer is nonsense.

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