The executive order that led to mass spying, as told by NSA alumni

3a. CIA people told new director, "er, boss, that was actually us".

3b. CIA director does not believe his own people.

And of course the whole "Team B" episode (Rumsfeld etc.), where the complete lack of evidence that the Soviets had <weapon-of-choice> was reinterpreted to mean they MUST OBVIOUSLY HAVE <even-worse-than-weapon-of-choice-even-if-physically-impossible> and perfect secrecy, otherwise how could we not have found any evidence?

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

http://vimeo.com/84414208

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

These are not, I should stress, the strangest people who held influence over the intelligence community in those days.

The official CIA judgement on the matter was more qualified, pointing out that the USSR supported "national insurgencies and some separatist-irredentist groups," but did not directly support terror groups (although they did support states like Libya that, in turn, supported and directed terror operations): "[T]he terrorist activities of these groups are not coordinated by the Soviets. The Soviets have on occasion privately characterized certain nihilistic terrorism as 'criminal,' and have urged other revolutionary groups to cease and desist from terrorist acts the Soviets considered 'self-defeating.'"

One certainly could point out that US support for groups like the Afghan mujahideen and the Pakistani government, the Central American Contras and their narco-trafficking allies, and right-wing "Gladio" networks in Europe would have, from the banks of the Moskva, looked a lot like US support for terrorism as well.

But CIA's considered analysis was basically ignored by senior political leadership, including CIA director Bill Casey, and a pervasive and almost hysterical suspicion of the Soviet leadership overshadowed US foreign policy for most of the 1980s, resulting in lost diplomatic opportunities and a few close calls with general war.

And, of course, what spy agency wouldn't want (4)?

If you create enough propaganda, repeat it long enough, and put great effort in to suppressing the debunking of that propaganda eventually your own people will fall victim to that propaganda and believe that it is unquestionably true. At that point any remaining success is not the result of good decision making but of either randomness or some very dominant advantage over all other parties.

Politics is particularly sensitive to this weakness. While the original group of propaganda producers understand what the bullshit in the message is, and understand the actual purpose of the action being justified is, even the brightest outside of this group will struggle to figure it out.

Without naming names, you can watch politicians and political groups trip and choke on their own propaganda all of the time. The simple explanation stuff sounds farcical, while incredible complex propaganda can often only be identified by someone with a deep understanding on the topic. Sometimes it is more dangerous to the producing group than the intended target.

But we never learn. The best thing that could happen right now for the NSA and the military in the mist of this criticism is another attack on US land, the former will say " see! This is why we need to spy today more than ever! " and the military would get another major money injection for decades to come and it gets to invade any country where they think the enemy might be.

In short, the practical threat is much lower for you than it is for an American. The CIA spied on the Intelligence committee charged with the agency's oversight. The NSA and CIA and FBI all likely have dossiers on every state and federal politician in the country. That means a heck of a lot more than them doing legit SIGINT on adversaries across the world.

And frankly, even if I completely agree with you, we're still talking about the U.S. Constitution being blatantly ignored. I know canonical legal documents of a country aren't as big a thing in other places, but here, it tends to mean something.

Civilisation (broadly speaking) doesn't evolves hand-in-hand with technology. It is the major danger of our future.

It's not about human rights.

edit - though admittedly here in the UK we are currently borrowing our citizenship and rights law direct from the pages of 2000AD http://usvsth3m.com/post/75158899178/the-uk-government-is-no...

But the worst part isn't that it's offensive to foreigners (which nobody cares about), it's that people so easily ignore that history knows no such thing as a unidirectional spy camera.

The readership at Hacker News firmly believes that the US is a surveillance state. Stories are chosen and upvoted which confirm this worldview. Dissenting opinions are downvoted. If you're looking for a reasoned evidence-based discussion of the NSA, then choose a different website.

With secret courts, secret interpretations of laws, gag orders etc. How does one obtain hard 'evidence' of anything (beyond whistleblowers)?

And what exactly do you mean by lack of sense? That we apply our limited knowledge to the scenarios described and then discard anything that doesn't neatly fit? That leads to cargo cult thinking.

Current employees who are happy and fulfilled in their work in the security services don't tend to say all that much to the press.

Yeah, we should all wait until they hand over the evidence in a golden plate, like secret agencies usually do.