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Comment by boguser | Hacker News Reader

That's nice & snarky.

IT looks like this genuine misconduct on the part of a paranoid intelligence agency trying to cover themselves from an investigation. This is what many allege the NSA was doing w/ bulk collection- individual people actively snooping around.

W/ the NSA program, you're just a row in a database, if you're not a terrorist* and do not associate with terrorists nobody has time to give rat's ass about what you're doing unless one can relate you to another suspicious character. That's national security stuff, sorry if ya don't like it, but tough.

THIS is different. This is real domestic spying by spies.

*"But how do we define terrorism, isn't one man's terrorist another man's freedom fighter wahhhh" -Tsarnaevs & people like them? Those are terrorists. Bad guys, got it?

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"W/ the NSA program, you're just a row in a database, if you're not a terrorist* or associate with terrorists nobody gives rat's ass about what you're doing unless one can relate you to another suspicious character. That's national security stuff, sorry if ya don't like it, but tough."

This "if you are not a terrorist don't worry" reasoning is flawed. GCHQ was capturing all Yahoo! webcams. That's not anti-terrorism, that's fodder for blackmail. You also don't surveil WoW to find terrorists. The Snowden leaks have shown many projects that have nothing to do with "national security", but if you say those magic words nobody can oversee what you're doing.

The CIA, NSA should be disbanded and replaced with new institutions. Those institutions should have limited scope and much tighter oversight.

IT looks like this genuine misconduct...

That doesn't make it different. An important reason for (ignored) prohibitions against what the NSA is doing is because of the possibility of misconduct. We must expect that, because it's humans running these programs, they will behave as humans.

So it's incorrect to say that we should view the violations as separate from the programs themselves. It's all part of the same discussion, which must include weighing what might go wrong, and the damage that it might do.

W/ the NSA program, you're just a row in a database,...

Which vastly multiplies both the opportunity for malfeasance, and the potential scope of damage that would result from it.

UPDATE: to whoever downvoted the parent, I don't think that's correct. Although I strongly disagree with its message, it is a common feeling that needs to be addressed. Even if it's wrong, having the comment as part of the discussion is valuable, as it allows us to explore why it's wrong. I have compensated with an upvote of my own.

> An important reason for (ignored) prohibitions against what the NSA is doing is because of the possibility of misconduct.

Not exactly. FISA wasn't adopted because of the abstract possibility of abuse of domestic surveillance, it was adopted because of actual and substantial abuse of domestic surveillance, including for political purposes.

I object to the notion that anything is okay so long as it's purportedly for national security.

Except that the US government has a quite long and documented history of spying on political opponents.

Whats sad is a few years ago I wouldn't believe that our gvt would waste money on combating negative views in online forums, but with your user being created 43 minutes ago and everything they've done so far. I don't put it past them that your account/post is paid for buy our tax dollars in some idiotic effort to change the views of the tech community.

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