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Comment by ericlavigne | Hacker News Reader

Whether it is acceptable for the NSA to eavesdrop on private messages should not depend on whether those messages are protected by encryption. If I send an unencrypted email to a friend, is the NSA allowed to eavesdrop and get a copy of that email? That is a policy question that can be discussed and answered without any knowledge of the NSA's decryption capabilities.

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If I was the NSA, I would flatly decline that we are doing any kind of eavesdropping at all. How would you prove we are eavesdropping? It is not like I am going to admit that information as evidence in a public court of law.

I think at this point we have to treat the NSA as guilty until proven innocent. Nothing they say, either to the public or publicly to our elected representatives Congress holds any water. How can we ever trust them again to be truthful?

Mostly true. (They won't deny EVERYTHING because that wouldn't be believable.)

If this argument is made convincingly in Congress, the NSA could lose funding, but that's a hard decision to make. Even if I am opposed to individual wars, that doesn't mean I would support complete disarmament. Foreign intelligence (and counter-intelligence) is an important part of any modern military. There needs to be public oversight without crippling US intelligence efforts. It's not clear how to accomplish that oversight. That is the discussion we really need to be having.

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Edit: Looks like there is an official effort to increase oversight of the NSA. Quoting from a Sept 4 article on http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/

   "On August 12, 2013 President Obama directed the establishment
   of the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications
   Technologies."

Link to the press release about this review group: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/08/12/presid...

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