Comment by jfasi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jfasi | Hacker News Reader

This provides a useful way to frame people concerns' about Snowden's revelations.

Every intelligence service exists at the intersection of two completely opposite goals: in order to fulfill their mandate to protect their country from its enemies, they need as much information about the actions of their enemies as possible. On the other hand, in order to protect their country from themselves, they need to have as light a touch as possible. There is no solution; you have to compromise.

The thing about compromises is that even though they tend to kinda sorta almost make sense when viewed in context, no one is every happy with them. Any large agency is going to employ a substantial number of people who find these compromises distasteful.

This report indicates that Al Qaeda, an organization that no one in their right mind would say should be allowed to operate freely, benefits from these sorts of disclosures. They learn what's vulnerable, they change their behavior, and they become more difficult to fight. What's worse, it's conceivable that the intelligence agency's response could be to increase the intensity of their activity, the better to capture the enemy's new behaviors.

Now imagine the quandary the intelligence agency faces. They try every day to meet mandates that are fundamentally unreconcilable. They employ people who disagree with the compromises at which they've arrived, and each and every one of them could potentially let the cat out of the bag and render their current work useless.

I don't mean this argument to criticize of praise the actions of the NSA. I only suggest that those (Americans) among you who demonize the NSA and advocate for it's removal consider this reframing of the discussion.

in order to fulfill their mandate to protect their country from its enemies, they need as much information about the actions of their enemies as possible.

But who is the enemy, and who defines them? Terrorist watch lists now contain over a million names in the US alone - are all those people plausible terrorists? Spy agencies now routinely record the communications of entire populations, domestic and foreign, and use that information for economic and political gain (why else spy on Petrobras and G20?). Terrorism seems to be the least of their preoccupations given the focus of their spying.

There is definitely a balance to be struck between a spying agency with effective oversight on their tremendous powers, pursuing only that tiny minority considered dangerous enemies who actively plan to attack (worldwide that is probably in the hundreds, or at most the thousands of people), and a spying agency which views surveilling entire populations, assassination en masse, denying travel, subverting encryption, and even spying on and lying to the politicians who oversee them as acceptable.

Unfortunately at present we find ourselves at one extreme of that continuum.

Is a sustained lack of oversight (from Congress, or anyone else) a necessary part of this compromise?

No, and I should have address this in my initial comment. I expanded on this in another comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8119589

You have some points. There is a lot of missing data though. Do we know that cracking their program was significant in gathering intelligence? Do we know if they even regularly use it?

The lack of oversight, or at least effective oversight, makes it difficult to trust the efficacy of their supposed tactics. Also if you want to be really pedantic about it how do you suss out causation vs correlation regarding Snowden? The only thing about the NSA that I feel really certain about is they want Snowden punished. That and they publicly lie and lie to congress, we know that too.

To your second point, oversight is orthogonal to my original point: no matter where you land on the breadth of collections spectrum, more oversight is better. I agree with you there and in hindsight I could have done better to point that out in my original post.

Now the first point deserves a response. This demand for proof of effectiveness for various intelligence gathering techniques misses the point of my initial comment. The public doesn't know if cracking this program was a significant source of information. On the other hand, neither does Al Qaeda. Spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt among your enemies is part of role of intelligence gathering, to the point where spreading the same among the population can be acceptable.

Consider the revelation that the NSA is gathering only a relatively small sample of phone records [1]. This information came out through a leak. Why didn't the NSA rebut allegations that they were sucking up every single conversation by revealing this information? It probably wouldn't have saved them in the public eye, but it would have at least dispelled the extremely damaging public perception of the NSA as an unstoppable Big Brother-style surveillance machine that's going to murder you for the contents of your emails, as opposed to an agency that, despite their twisting the letter of the law, is still forced to operate within legal boundaries. Why didn't this report come out to try to at least correct the public's paranoia?

The answer is because doing so would have given the US's enemies guidance on how to run their operations, which would allow them to more effectively evade detection. In this context, this sort of secrecy and fear appears to be a hateful but ultimately necessary part of intelligence: you can't assuage the public without assuaging your enemies.

At the same time, the public still have to be protected from a spy agency, and this is where mandatory oversight and regulation comes into play. While Congress has vowed to implement strengthened oversight over the NSA, the public isn't satisfied because this oversight is performed in secret. I'm sort of prepared to let myself be convinced that this oversight exists, but the truth is that whatever solution is implemented is bound to be unsatisfying for exactly the reason I point out above: hateful secrecy is necessary.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-is...

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

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