The difference from other fields, is that the consequences in other fields are public. If a soldier shoots someone, that someone is dead and can prompt an investigation.
If someone in the NSA abuses his powers, it is very likely that nobody will ever know. Or be able to know. No investigation will be triggered, and even if one is, it cannot possibly gather any evidence.
But this claim is only a concern if an analyst can unilaterally abuse his power and never be caught. Are you saying this type of surveillance capability would then be acceptable if proper accountability and oversight safeguards can be emplaced?
If anything this should be one of the easier things in the world to do, putting audit trails on computerized systems is hardly "pro league" stuff.
But either way, you say that the consequences will at least be public in other scenarios. But that's not really true either. People get shot every day in this country; how do you know that any given shooting wasn't from a soldier? How do you know when the government lets a contract that they actually fully complied with the Federal Acquisition Regulations? How do you know that when a Congressman votes against his normal voting habits, whether that vote was due to his conscience or due to someone else's wallet? How do you know that when the NSF gives one scientist a grant and refuses another, that it was done in the public interest?
You don't know any of this, as a rule, and yet many of those are much more impactful on the average citizen, even if we assume the existence of lapses in oversight.
As far as I can tell with government IT, your data will always be at more risk of being leaked to cybercriminals via hacking or stupidity (the latter has happened to me already!), than be at risk of being looked at by a rogue NSA agent.
1) Write down the law
2) Break it
3) Retroactively make the violation legal
Wrt to what oversight exists, well... the fact that they have no idea what material Snowden took with him is telling. But that's not what I'd be the most worried about. How hard would it be for the White House to ask information about a specific individual for "national security" reasons?
> But either way, you say that the consequences will at least be public in other scenarios. But that's not really true either. People get shot every day in this country; how do you know that any given shooting wasn't from a soldier?
I'm not a US citizen, but I would think murders are investigated by the police. It's usually difficult to hide.
> How do you know when the government lets a contract that they actually fully complied with the Federal Acquisition Regulations?
I suppose there are audits? Not to suggest that abuse does not exist, but I assume there is some oversight.
> How do you know that when a Congressman votes against his normal voting habits, whether that vote was due to his conscience or due to someone else's wallet?
You certainly don't, but you can make an educated guess.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. That the NSA doesn't need any form of oversight, and can be 100% trusted with the power to snoop on everybody belonging to any country (knowing - in case you thought "I don't care about these dirty foreigners as long as they promise not to look at US data" - that nothing prevents them from asking another Five Eyes member about your whereabouts without breaking the rules)? From the same government which gave you Guantanamo, extraordinary rendition, warrantless wiretapping and extrajudicial executions-by-drone? Their definition of legality is terribly elastic.
That's not at all what I'm trying to say. In fact I would argue very strong oversight is needed, but I'd also argue that very strong oversight is possible in the first place, which means that oversight (or not) is not the proper reason to argue about the very existence of the program in the first place.
In other words, the program(s) are either required or not. If they are required, determine the needed level of oversight and install it. If it's not required, then it's not required and discussions about oversight are simply redundant.
You mean, besides his family, friends, and loved ones when he loses his job and potentially ends up in prison. You're underestimating the amount of training and internal oversight that occurs.
The cases of caught individuals seem to have gone under-punished, as they sound worthy of prison time.
Also, even if the NSA polices against personal abuses, why would it police against systematic abuse for government's purposes against the constitution?
Self-policing does not work well, especially without elaborate mechanisms to enable it to work, and especially with a combination of secrecy and lack of oversight.
Now, systemic problems are a different issue. But the article we're all talking about here is written by an analyst from his own perspective.