No Morsel Too Minuscule for All-Consuming N.S.A.
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The NSA is supposed to spy only on foreigners, not on domestic targets. It seems to have transformed foreign and domestic to mean outside and inside the NSA. Without accountability elected officials, why would they stop?
Our would-be leaders aren't leading. They are being led by their agencies, who are developing more and more power. It would seem the task falls on us to lead our elected officials if we hope to avoid a point of no return of NSA usurping power if we haven't already.
Americans have led its leaders to desired outcomes before -- civil rights, for example -- but results took generations and many jobs remain unfinished. Let's hope we have the fortitude on this one.
> “I think it’s already starting to happen,” he said. “That’s what we have to stop.”
African americans are strictly better off when having the right to vote as opposed to not having the right to vote. Same argument applies for women.
The terrorist threat argument cannot be ignored, and it's plausible to believe that many threats against american assets are hatched in the US and communicated in the US. Likewise, the privacy argument cannot be ignored. So in this case, we have a classic tradeoff.
To put it differently: are you better off dead or with the NSA?
That assumes the NSA is keeping me alive. I'm not convinced.
Also, it's supposed to be the FBI that investigates domestic security and crimes. And whoever's doing it, it's supposed to be specific, not everyone.
One might ask, are you better off watched, or Constitutionally free?
So you would trust a proven bad actor against one where there is no evidence as yet ?
Where's the beef? There is none. If the NSA does not justify it's existence in an open forum then we must dismantle it.
And it is not enough to prove that the NSA intercepted an operation; it must be proven that, in the absence of the NSA, the same interception would not have occurred and that consequently something significantly evil would have occurred. There are plenty of other federal, state and local agencies that collect information in a legal and constitutionally-mandated manner and they have proven very effective.
"To put it differently: are you better off dead or with the NSA?"
Nonsensical scare-mongering.
Wow. Please justify your existence or face dismantlement.
- NSA with real teeth in the provisions for "don't spy on US citizens", or lying about same.
- NSA with effective, non-crony oversight.
- NSA with less influence over cryptographic research (maybe we need to split out crypto into an arm of the government that isn't involve in intelligence activities. NIST might be a good choice).
- NSA absolutely forbidden to "back door" US designed hardware and software.
There are lots of choices other than "You can have the NSA we have today, or you can be roadkill." (It's also unclear that the "OMG terrorist" argument is valid -- like "think of the children," I'm pretty sick of unexamined arguments that appear to be rooted in creating fear).
The more things change, the more things stay the same:
”Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
— Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775
Instead, the question is one of acceptable risk. The concept of risk is something the American public has seemed to have completely forgotten about. The (anecdotally) general attitude that has evolved in America is one of pigeonholing things into black and white, of "zero tolerance" and "any risk is unacceptable", rather than one of rationally weighing the pros and cons of a complex, grey situation.
One doesn't have to look very far back in history to see the massively life-crushing power a surveillance state can wield. Just look back 30 or 40 years--that might easily be in your own lifetime--to see the millions of lives worsened or even ended thanks to surveillance-based societies. America obviously isn't at that stage yet, but as Binney said, we're at the point where all it would take is to turn a key and we'd be there overnight.
Compare that to the risk of what the NSA is purportedly protecting us against. Between 2007-2011 your chances of dying in a terrorist attack were 1 in 20 million [1]. Meanwhile the chance of dying in a car accident is 1 in 19,000; of drowning in a bathtub 1 in 800,000; of dying by getting hit by lighting 1 in 5.5 million. [2] How can we justify constructing a turnkey surveillance state to "protect" us against the risk of terrorism, while simultaneously not justifying constructing a global weather-control system to end the risk of lightning strikes? Or a nationwide ban on bathtubs to end the risk of bathtub drownings? Or shutting down all the freeways to end the risk of car accidents?
We're all going to die somehow, and setting foot outside of your house carries a risk that a ladder might fall on your head, or that you'll slip in a puddle and break your neck. And yet we're totally OK with constructing the largest surveillance apparatus human history has ever seen to "protect" us against a 1 in 20 million chance that some lunatic will set off a bomb somewhere.
How did our ability to assess and, most importantly, accept the reality of everyday risk go so completely bonkers?
[1] http://swampland.time.com/2013/05/06/chances-of-dying-in-a-t... [2] http://reason.com/archives/2011/09/06/how-scared-of-terroris...
To put some perspective on terrorism. A 9/11 size event would have to occur every 6 weeks to approach the causality rate from automobile accidents.
I think the terrorism card has been played a bit too much by the administration. Yes, there is a threat, but it's much more of a threat to embassy staff and military overseas than ordinary Americans. I think it's used as justification because it's easier for Americans to see terrorists as threatening after the 9/11 attacks. It's harder for the average American to feel threatened by foreign spies and state-sponsored hackers, or see the value in spying on foreign government officials.
The parties who stand to benefit from cutting back NSA spying are the people who are targeted by it. Most of the articles that come out just show how the NSA is conducting their collection and then pass on assumptions that they must be targeting everyone. The NYT article we're discussing today actually goes into some detail on who they're targeting. Any tradeoff discussion needs to focus what they're actually doing and whether or not the US would be better without it. The problem of who they could be targeting can be dealt with using proper oversight and legal frameworks - we have an armed police force but don't live in fear of random officers breaking into our homes and gunning down our families.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/01/fbi-prevent-boston-...
It'll just keep going, in a spiral of apathetic voters and unaccountable leaders. Eventually, be it decades or centuries, Something Bad™ will happen and the US will collapse in a catastrophic fashion.
But it's probably too late to stop the NSA from having an inappropriate level of power.
And I don't know how to fix that. Politicians will promise this won't happen again, but the fact that it happened in the first place shows they cannot be trusted. Maybe Hacker News should secede and form a nation-state on a paradisiac island?
1: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/01/gchq-europe-s...
You don't know how to fix it? Here's a start: stop grouping people into ridiculously large categories like "Westerners" or "politicians" or "terrorists". How do you think this starts?
I'm not suer about that, I think it's more of the 'open secret' variety
>They also do not come with a check-and-balance mechanism precisely supposed to prevent the emergence of the new Stasi we're seeing here
So the existence of checks and frameworks make the situation worse? What?
What I'm trying to say is that, there are a lot of things to address first in authoritarian regimes before you address mass electronic surveillance. You can't get upset that a plane does not fly straight when it's not equipped with wings in the first place.
This is entirely different from what the rest of your post says. Your actual point seems to be that the big difference is that authoritarian regimes are authoritarian, not that their surveillance implementations are particularly secretive.
Lumping India in as an authoritarian regime is sort of odd, but okay. How about Egypt? Singapore? Kenya? Brazil? Argentina? Turkey? My point is just that this kind of surveillance is a global phenomenon. My unstated point is that it's a product of national boundaries. Just like the existence of strong corporations results in corporate espionage and internal monitoring, the existence of strong governments results in government espionage and internal monitoring. If you tell them to compete, they're going to compete, and they're not going to be nice about it.
So you'd need to transition Russia to a democratic state before you could tackle mass surveillance.
What's happening at the NSA has many analogues in the private sector and is to a large extent driven by technology.
It's so cute when people put statements like this in the future tense. Why do you think J. Edgar Hoover was never replaced from the founding of the FBI to his death? How has the CIA gotten away with decades of documented criminal activity? What really happened in Dallas almost 50 years ago?
They could go farther than just the NSA and extend it to every single employee of the US government and its contractors. Those in the US government pushing for this level of surveillance are never going to scale back until they know exactly what if feels like to be subjected to the same level of surveillance. At the very least extend it as far as every US senator and representative that is pro-surveillance. i.e. if your voting record shows that have voted on bills extending the surveillance state, then you automatically become a target to have everything you and your administration has every said and written captured and published for the rest of the World to read in real time.
There is no better way to counteract this than Mutually Assured Transparency. i.e establish a policy of "If you won't allow us to have privacy and secrets, we won't allow you to have them either." At the end of the day, the NSA is never going away without drastic measures that make it's existence a liability for the US instead of an asset.
The worst thing the rest of the World can do is take the NSA and the current administration at its word. For example, it recently said that it has stopped tapping Angela Merkel's phone calls and communication, but what proof do we have that it has actually stopped. There is no way to prove that it is no longer happening and the people who say that they've stopped have lied for years on this very topic and still deep down believe what they did was valid, so we really have zero justification for trusting that the surveillance has actually stopped. Even if they did stop, we can reasonably assume that they only did so to the letter but not intent. e.g., how do we know that they aren't still keeping tabs on her by tapping everyone about her, but her. You can still assume a lot about a leader by knowing everything her subordinates are saying and doing.
If you are a citizen of one of the country's that have been victim of this spying you should suggest this idea to those representatives of yours that are likely to support a plan like this.
Torture-cough-cough. Accept women and children as collateral killings in drone strikes-cough-cough. Violate our own Constitution-cough-cough.
Anything? Maybe not. Enough to be close enough.
It's easy to do anything when God is on your side.
Can you count the number of important revelations they just casually released here? Just because it fit into their writing style of "making no definite statements, ever"?
It's essentially a raw data dump transmogrified into the annoying, inefficient writing of last centuries journalism. Give us the facts, give us the information, not your pointless hunches about "suspected terrorists".
This is the kind of information that the public needs to ask informed questions on the NSA's activities, like: Is the collection actually valuable to national security? Is it of diplomatic value? Does that value outweigh the diplomatic costs when the collection is revealed? What are the financial costs of the collection? Are those costs worth it? What about all of the collection that is never analyzed? What aspects of the NSA's collection/funding/bureaucratic processes need to be changed to best fit the public interest?
I've argued for some time that how the NSA is collecting is not nearly as important as who and why. The initial disclosure about the cell phone metadata was a legitimate call for concern - I agree with everyone on that. The cause for concern there wasn't how they were gathering the data, it was that they were collecting on US citizens and we didn't know why. They left those questions to be answered by the administration, who has published a good deal of detail on the Section 215 collection program[1]. If their explanation is innacurate, then the ball is back in the media's court to pull evidence showing so from that collection of 50,000 documents that Snowden gave them. Meanwhile, Congress is continuing to debate this collection now.
My issue is with most of the other reporting. Most of the other leaks so far have revealed how - PRISM, XKeyScore, the Google/Yahoo collection, etc. What the media outlets have failed to do is show evidence linking this back to collection against ordinary citizens. Articles that would be more accurately titled something like "The NSA collects vast amounts of data using X" instead are presented as "The NSA collects vast amounts of Americans' data using X". They conflate collection authorities and present it as fact to the audience. For example, the NSA is permitted by law (under certain interpretations - the EFF is looking to challenge this in court) to collect American cell phone metadata under Section 215, but is expressly forbidden from collecting American data under FAA 702 authorities. Leaked slides show that the PRISM program is their mechanism for collecting FAA 702 data. Any article claiming that the NSA is collecting such-and-such data against Americans but then goes on to cite PRISM as evidence is conflating the evidence.
The how matters to the people being targeted. The who and why matters to everyone regardless of targeting. If there is evidence linking these other programs back to collection against ordinary citizens, we need to know. If we are being targeted, we need to know the how to protect ourselves. What we've been getting, though, is descriptions of collection programs with "they're probably using this to collect on everyone!" sprinkled into the description. If these programs are only used to target legitimate foreign intelligence targets, then what have we ordinary citizens gained by knowing how? In revealing this, what have those being targeted learned and how does that affect national security, diplomacy, etc.?
If you read through the whole 7 pages of this article, they talk a good deal about who is being targeted and why; discuss the successes and failures, hint at what intelligence has had valuable impact and what hasn't; talk about the immense funding and bureaucratic stumbling blocks that has led to an excess of collection that has never been and may never be analyzed; etc., and do so in a manner that the administration says will not affect ongoing operations. I stand by my statement that this is important information that the public needs in order to ask informed questions to their elected representatives. I would ask why it took this many months to surface, and why it didn't come from The Guardian or the Washington Post, who have had this information for much longer.
If you disagree with me, I invite you to state your reasons why and continue with the conversation rather than downvote.
[1] https://www.eff.org/document/administration-white-paper-sect...
Russia and China are the usual bugbears for the DoD. Over there, they spend roughly ~140 billion combined to the the DoD's ~750. What are the odds the ratio is similar with spying as well?