NSA Officers Sometimes Spy on Love Interests | Hacker News Reader

NSA Officers Sometimes Spy on Love Interests

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82 pointsdanso21 comments

NSA said in a statement Friday that there have been "very rare" instances of willful violations of any kind in the past decade, and none have violated key surveillance laws.

So there have been willful violations, but they didn't violate key surveillance laws? How does that work?

There are important surveillance laws, those that give the NSA power, and less important ones.

Same way a cop who murder's someone in the line of duty doesn't mean the department murdered someone. That part makes sense.

The question(as with cops), is what happened to the people who did violate the rules? It's unlikely they were fired or prosecuted, hopefully they were demoted and lost access to the system.

NSA is loath to fire people(and likely revoke their clearance if it's for cause) with serious classified knowledge since getting a comparable paying job with a revoked clearance and a large gap on your resume would be very hard. The worry is they would simply sell knowledge to a foreign government.

It doesn't. I could go into a long explanation as to why, but basically it is like this: they're assholes and they interpret the law as they see fit.

This is the beauty of phrases like "in the interests of national security".

What are the odds that NSA officers sometimes engage in insider trading?

>Most of the incidents, officials said, were self-reported. Such admissions can arise, for example, when an employee takes a polygraph tests as part of a renewal of a security clearance.

So the only way we catch them is when they admit it. Great.

Seems like this narrative hasn't been explored and could have legs. I'm not holding my breath, but I'd like to see a solid media piece that hammered this idea home for the American-folk.

If anyone wants to discourage bright hackers from working at the NSA, make it creepy to their potential love interests: publish stories at popular sites with titles like, "Is your NSA girlfriend/boyfriend reading your Facebook messages?"

surely that will do the trick

Well why wouldn't they? The NSA is run by humans after all.

I would have to agree. Tell me any large organization where there's not a few infractions in a decade.

And I'm no apologist for the NSA, I just think intellectual honesty is good for our side of the argument.

In a way, things like this are a part of the whole bloody point that opponents of the NSA have been making: if you put that much surveillance power into the hands of a relatively small number of humans, then they will abuse it. These sort of incidents reveal through their pettiness some of the ways in which massive surveillance invites abuse.

> And I'm no apologist for the NSA, I just think intellectual honesty is good for our side of the argument.

Pretty much. Every fanciful tale we tell ourselves is another story that can be spun as reinforcement for why we're dismissable.

I tell myself that this kind of tactical thinking isn't the right way to motivate people to actually care about truth, but at this point, I've completely lost faith that hackers are capable of caring about the truth.

"Oh dont worry, the only abuses at the NSA are jilted lovers spying on exs, trust us!"

It sounds like a load of hork, especially considering the sliding slope of truth they have been pushing lately.

I was going to ask why these agencies even use polygraphs but found an answer on wikipedia: "According to a report to Congress, polygraphy in the security clearance context has little utility in detecting untruth, but significant utility in inducing verbal admissions. That is, polygraphy is mainly useful as a prop in the interrogation process. Further, this likely accounts for its continuing use by government agencies." Sounds real reliable.

It's totally just a prop they use as an interrogation trick, much like the fake phone in Stasi detention centers that the interrogator would pretend to receive timely intel on whoever they were interrogating, or use it to make pretend calls to HQ to go pick up the person's family for questioning if they didn't like the answers. Cops to this day use a lot of those tricks, like the file folder they come into your cell with that's full of scrap paper they claim is 'all the evidence against you, so you better start talking'.

Penn & Teller Bullshit did a good episode on lie detecting pseudoscience: http://youtu.be/8NLf7XwLpyQ

> Most of the incidents, officials said, were self-reported. Such admissions can arise, for example, when an employee takes a polygraph tests as part of a renewal of a security clearance

So of the vague number of reported violations that the NSA will admit to, most of them are found through confessions...and some of these apparently come from the kind of NSA employee who can't fool a polygraph test.

There are so many comical things about this that it's almost hard to be indignant

Nobody watches the watchers. We're supposed to just have blind trust.

In Polygraph we trust.

Btw, "spying on love interest", pardon my English, isn't it just a PC expression for "stalking"?

Yes.

Such admissions can arise, for example, when an employee takes a polygraph tests as part of a renewal of a security clearance.

Interestingly, this is very illegal for private companies to do under EEPA. Why should government employers get an exception?

It looks like there's a few different exemptions: http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs36.htm

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