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Comment by Derbasti | Hacker News Reader

At this point, it may well be impossible to shut down the NSA. I imagine every opposing politician gets visited by some agent at some point, showing him records of his own wrongdoings.

Imagine every politician ever be forced to choose between the end of his career and opposing the NSA. How can we get out of this mess?

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Order some armed body to take over all NSA sites and burn things to the ground. Reason being in the set of (libel|slander|extortion|treason).

That is precisely what the Founding Fathers intended to happen in this situation. Calling the militia!

This is exactly why that amendment exists. Instead, the vast majority of the individuals with the guns are far more upset that about protecting bigotry than protecting their rights. And the liberals on the side of rights, are generally less inclined to actually use guns.

I know a lot of those individuals with guns, and would say that's more a media caricature than reality.

It boggles my mind how quickly people who know absolutely nothing about guns and have almost no knowledge of the lives of gun owners are nevertheless so extremely willing to put forward ideas about such based on nothing but prejudice and ignorance.

Liberals are always on the side of increasing state power. eg. State run health care, mandatory state run schools (ban homeschooling), outlaw guns (increase state monopoly of force), mandatory vaccines (state dictates control over your health). Your positions are false and absurd.

Ironically, if citizens actually did that then the government officials would classify it as terrorism and use it as an excuse to crack down and demand new powers.

And politicians need to learn not to be so pusillanimous. What do you think would happen if a politician came to the media and revealed that some spook had tried to blackmail him for proposing an anti-surveillance bill? It would cause the bill to pass and the politician to be reelected. It would be like surviving an assassination attempt -- and if you could prove it you would become practically beyond reproach, because anything anyone ever said bad about you again could be attributed to the blackmailers.

> would classify it as terrorism

It is terrorism. By definition: the use of violence and/or intimidation for political goals.

Perhaps you could argue that terrorism is a constitutional right?

There are at least 11 definitions of terrorism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_terrorisma

> It is terrorism. By definition: the use of violence and/or intimidation for political goals.

That's what I'm saying. They've defined terrorism to be "political violence" and declared it to be unmitigated evil -- it's sleight of hand. Is a riot terrorism now? Is a revolution? Were the US soldiers who killed Nazis in WWII "terrorists"? It's propaganda. They're hypocritically condemning political violence while engaging in it. They're equating violence by foreign radicals against a country's people with violence by a country's people against its own corrupt government.

It's putting George Washington, Malcolm X and Osama bin Laden into the same category for the purposes of collective condemnation. The only way it makes for a useful method of categorization is if you're already in power and want to disenfranchise anyone without the political power within the existing system to make change, regardless of the legitimacy of their position.

I'm sure there are subtle ways to make this threat without making this threat. Like spread a rumor that it already happened and let people see the results.

There isn't a lot of room between saying it in a way that makes the threat clear to the politician and saying it in a way that doesn't make the threat clear to the New York Times reporter listening to the recording.

Also, the NSA could just kill you and make it look like a heart attack. As could the mafia, Goldman Sachs, Ted Bundy or AT&T. Doing the right thing is the right thing even if bad people aren't going to like it.

The real reason they're collecting everything is not to fight terrorism, it's to provoke terrorism. More terrorism means more power to them.

Actually I think that would get them shut down pretty quickly, right now. Politicians would be scared of the NSA. But if the NSA could pass the information to a different law enforcement, who then build a parallel case, they could knock out their opponents without making themself a target.

This would require a good amount of coordination and risk. These politicians are pretty well connected. And I think that if one politician was threatened, they'd likely bring in many others for support. As much as politicians may hate those of the opposing party -- being blackmailed by the NSA would likely go too far and would be the quickest way to have congress shutdown the powers of the NSA. No one in congress is so naïve to think that the NSA blackmailing a politician could never happen to them.

That thought has crossed my mind, but I think the advantage of being well connected might not be enough.

A scenario: Imagine a powerful politician being approached by some shady guy in a trenchcoat who does not officially work for anyone. Shady guy produces some kind of material that, at best, is deeply embarrassing and personally damaging, and at worst, embroils said politician in a scandal that would cause professional damage, possibly even result in legal issues that this politician's power isn't enough to withstand.

Considering such a scandal is there to expose, said politician is probably not a paragon of virtue. Would this politician not bend to will of the shady guy? Even if he knew that shady guy is NSA, he could probably not prove it and exposing this knowledge would cause the damaging material to do it's job and only cast suspicion on the NSA.

I think the reason why the NSA could easily use information to blackmail politicians is that secrets are by definition kept hidden to as few people as possible. As such, these collectively powerful individuals can still be privately vulnerable, and are likely to opt for keeping their secrets over fighting some 'faceless' organization.

The idea of shutting down the NSA is destructive: their charter is to listen to foreign traffic, and to secure domestic traffic. That's what they kick ass at. That their abilities got co-opted for unapproved purposes was NOT the NSA's doing. The problem came from outside the NSA, and was likely out of their control.

Under what definitions of "foreign" and "domestic"?

Actually, no. Snowden was the only one willing to sacrifice anything to reveal the truth to the public - and he wasn't even an official NSA employee. We can gnash our teeth and pull our hair about how the agency was "co-opted" but the fact remains that precisely zero of the NSA's ~40,000 employees stepped forward with anything like this. So what can we infer from this? Many things, of course, but that the organization was whole-sale "co-opted" is rather a stretch. 40k people doing something horrible for 12 years and a trickle of ineffective attempts to do something...

There is, perhaps, a more "innocent" explanation - or at least one that reflects better on the rank-and-file at the NSA: that it took someone like Snowden, not just idealistic and willing to sacrifice, but his intelligence and unique collection of technical skills, to make something like this happen. The NSA is a frightening adversary, the best funded, best equipped, most sophisticated intel organization on the planet. One could be forgiven for thinking twice before burning them... But is that fear enough to keep 40k people quiet for 12 years?! I'd say that we can only infer that the rank-and-file are massively in favor of the steps the NSA is taking, and probably mostly for noble reasons of wanting to "protect" us all. And what we can infer from that is that clearly the NSA selects for loyalty over principle, every time. Well, maybe they failed that once.

The thing that really bothers me is that it's such an inevitably fail-prone approach to protection, as it requires massive numbers of people to keep a secret in perpetuity. And now the big reveal: it has materially damaged us all. American technological trustworthiness is (rightly) at an all time low. My only hope is that this failure has been dramatic, so memorable, so horrible, that it will spur all computer technologists to learn more about security, the details of cryptography and random number generation, and to stop assuming that US authorities will show anything like common sense when it comes to restraining themselves and their power. They are drunk with it, self-righteously drunk with it, and we must work to take that power away in every possible way: politically, technologically, and indeed, philosophically. I mention philosophy last, but it's really the most important: are we a nation of principles, or are we a nation that takes shortcuts, sacrificing principle for pride of protection? In addition to testing for technological prowess, we need to test our intelligence staffers for high ethical intelligence: they need to be willing and able to rebel against illegal orders just as Snowden has done.

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