Comment by MisterWebz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MisterWebz | Hacker News Reader

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That is an incredibly weak argument.

First of all, whether they are shameless or not doesn't really matter. If sexually explicit pictures of a politician end up on the internet, his reputation takes damage. It's beyond his control. Plenty of politicians are willing to go to great lengths to avoid this. So what does it matter if he's shameless or not?

Second of all, politicians and other powerful people might have something to hide that isn't just embarrassing but is also illegal. It's certainly not beyond the capabilities of the NSA to target powerful people that oppose the NSA while ignoring those that support them.

For example, in the news you might read about a CEO that gets convicted of insider trading. Nothing to worry about, right? Well, what if the NSA purposefully targeted him because they don't like whatever it is he's doing? Using parallel construction, it wouldn't even have links to the NSA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Weiner_sexting_scandal...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio

Nacchio was convicted of running a pump-and-dump insider trading scam that netted him ~$100MM at the expense of common public shareholders. If there's an award for "most obnoxious implication of NSA's wrongdoing", it should go to the attempted rehabilitation of people like Nacchio.

Here's the indictment. It's quite straightforward.

http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site36/2007/0307...

Here's the cliff notes:

"No later than December 4, 2000, through and including September 10, 2001, NACCHIO was aware of material, non-public information about Qwest’s business, including, but not limited to" [litany of distressing concerns about Qwest's bottom line which ultimately proved dispositive in valuing Qwest].

Note the date.

Now, look at this table of Nacchio's stock sales:

http://oi60.tinypic.com/2n1tgr6.jpg

Nacchio claims to have believed that secret national security government contracts were going to rescue Qwest from their financial problems (note the implicit concession that Qwest had problems from which its financials needed to be rescued). One tie-in between Nacchio and NSA is the notion that by refusing requests from NSA, Nacchio lost those contracts. Stipulate that this is true; it's a plausible complaint. Nacchio still took the money and ran.

Of course an indictment is going to make the indicted sound like scum. It's not exactly an unbiased document.

The pertinent questions in the Nacchio case are P(insider trading), P(getting caught), and P(getting caught | rejected NSA).

I don't see any pertinent question other than P(insider trading), which sure looks a lot like '1'.

P(insider trading | telecom CEO) is what I meant. Iff Nacchio was singled out for illegal but commonplace behavior, then it matters less to me what he did and more why he was the only one prosecuted. But if every insider trade has equal likelihood of getting caught, regardless of refusing NSA taps, then Nacchio is far less interesting.

I don't know if every inside trader has an equal likelihood of being caught, but Nacchio's case appears to have been particularly brazen. The facts I presented aren't disputed: he sold over one hundred million dollars of stock in a time period where the future of his company was very much in doubt, taking advantage of information his company didn't share with common investors.

The tragic thing about core human societal issues like this the same issues keep coming back, again and again- Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The truth is people with uncountable power will use that power unaccountably. I think often the person who gains the power originally isn't an abuser, but rather one of their successors.

The NSA needs accountability. But better yet, is removal of unnecessary power.

It might have sounded like paranoia in the past, but without evidence to the contrary, I will side with history and assume the abuses described above are happening.

> It's certainly not beyond the capabilities of the NSA to target powerful people that oppose the NSA while ignoring those that support them.

I had to think something similar when I read this in your parent post:

if NSA is missing major activities of other countries (the Russian intervention in Ukraine) and nonstate terrorist groups (the "Islamic State" capture of much territory in Iraq), then surely NSA doesn't have the time and resources to analyze all of the data it gathers, and maybe it is not gathering as much data as some people claim.

That is, how do we know for a fact the NSA missed this? Could it not also simply have not acted on it, for whatever reasons? E.g. I know on the surface it's in the interest of the US to have "stability" in the Middle East, but even former CIA people have been warning since the buildup to the Iraq war, that some strategies and tactics can lead to more terrorism, more instability. And then exactly that happened, because their warnings were not heeded. Am I to believe that was incompetence? I know this borders on tinfoil terrority, but I really don't mean to outright claim what my questions might imply, I am just wondering and genuinely curious/clueless, I don't read news regularly, so I have no idea what the NSA having no idea about the Ukraine and ISIS stuff is referring to.

So glad you mentioned Nacchio.

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