The NSA and Me
firstlook.org
firstlook.org
Until the guilty are prosecuted, there won't be any real change in the way that the U.S. intelligence agencies operate. Half-measures and bullshit platitudes from the powers that be are insufficient. Justice must be served, and if necessary, people need to go to jail.
1) Was something legally done wrong (could be what we'd consider "morally" wrong, but still legal)? [If yes, go 2)]
2) Does it appear that it was knowingly done wrong? [If yes, go 3)]
3) Is there an evidence trail supporting that it was knowingly done wrong? [If yes, go 4, else, check the separate case for evidence destruction]
4) Does that evidence supply enough burden of proof for specific individuals that a reasonable case could be built against them with a good chance of Justice winning? [If yes, go 5, else, go 6]
5 - yes?) Prosecute as many of those people as possible to signal that bad social behaviour has consequences (similar to the banker argument)
6 - no?) Is there enough to support a general recrimination of the agency and to press for legal changes to its procedures? [If yes, go 7, else, go 8]
7 - yes?) Recommend a set of changes which in the future would help to ensure that insight / oversight isn't just a paper tiger.
8 - no?) Welp, we're boned for now.
I disagree. There will be changes, but for the worse.
Because now those running the programs have a real world validated proof that people don't care and there are no consequences. So that is a good signal to crank up the level a few notches.
This means you should not expect any pressure to come from the US public/voters and therefor there is no change to expect from the US as a nation.
I personally think that all the outrage at the government is misplaced. They are ultimately just doing what the people want. The US isn't groping airline passengers and holding terror suspects for years without trial and torturing people for information and spying on its own citizens because the government is running out of control and the people can't reign it in. They're doing these things because "the people", as a whole, want it. Demand it in many cases.
If we want change, we must convince the population of our views. The rest will follow naturally if that can be done. No, I have no idea how.
Do you really think sending a few scapegoats to prison will solve anything? The problems are systemic. Some faces may change but the agencies remain organized and financed the same way.
Even amongst the Nazis, most high level people had compartmentalized knowledge that was only evil when combined. Indeed, the subtitle and thesis of the book reflects that: "on the banality of evil."
Her theory is that unethical organizations can structure themselves in such a way that almost nobody is actively breaking the law.
Hardly surprising the organisations that employ them feel they're above the law.
The U.S. Army feels that it is above the law?
While there are certainly people at the top that need to go to jail (and it obviously is an open question as to who and how many), I strongly suspect that many of the people working there are simply following vague or seemingly-unrelated orders. Also, cries of urgency and need are hard to ignore, especially when they are wrapped in patriotism and the idea that you're trying to protect others.
All of this is especially true at the NSA, which is historically very compartmentalized ("need to know"), which further confuses the issue.
As for the future once those responsible are jailed, vigilance is the price of peace. In this case, what would be making sure regulation/oversight happens and actually has the power to do their job. The problem of regulatory capture is the systemic problem across the government in general. We need to address that problem (urgently), but it is not an NSA specific problem.
I don't think the threat of prosecution would, actually, for several reasons. But it any part of the government was willing to uphold the law, it might make people think twice, that maybe following illegal orders isn't patriotic after all.
This is truly frightening stuff.
The NSA is above the law. Even when they're not; they have the power to change the law.
I am a USMC Iraq combat vet (most of my time was during the "surge"). I spent most of my years since I got out trying to follow the strands up the chain to figure out what went wrong, and quite frankly, every single branch of government, including the fourth estate, has been compromised by the security state aka the military congressional corporate industrial complex. The executive is compromised, justice is compromised, the legislative is compromised.
Nobody wanted to hear my rants on the NSA pre-Snowden. Now they don't want to hear me explain the why, and get too caught up in the how.
My real problem is that none of these concerns are being addressed in any meaningful way by any of the people at the top. If the transition from nation-state security matters to single-actor threats is as insidious as the security apparatus purports it to be, they should explain their logic. So far though, it seems they have decided to undermine in a very conscious manner the constitution of the United States of America, without so much as notifying the American public.
Think scandalous messages, photos, habits, locations.
Blackmail. Relationship ending.
Outing sexual preferences.
Horrific shit.
tl;dr: If Congress wanted to chastise the NSA, all they have to do is not fund it.
That's [another, besides GP's] reason why Congress would never choose to chastise NSA.
I would argue that if you cannot prove it, then you should consider whether or not the assertion is coming more from a negative, cynical sentiment than from any real fact.
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=i&showYe...
These people are unaccountable ghosts; there's nothing to stop them from masquerading as anything from "retail" to "misc manufacturing" to "pharma". But back to your theory. What about "revenue producing" parts of the government (which is what, the IRS?) would cause them to loom larger in a politician's thinking than the sums of money recorded on the linked page?
Sure, its not a "Defund the NSA" bill, but it is an effort to curtail some of the most objected to content from the Snowden stuff, and a pretty large number of politicians supported it, presumably without repercussions.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/3361
[2] https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/4190
[3] https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/1091
1. the NSA has no reason to fight a bill at all unless there's a risk it will pass. Even then, their first choice would likely be to try to put selective pressure on enough people to just barely stop it. Why? Because the appearance of such freedom to oppose them provides ammunition for their supporters against the worst claims made about them, and limits the whispers about NSA interference. They presumably also realise that a lot of people voting for such a bill don't really care, and will forget about the issue soon enough, while pressure might make people care. Deeply.
2. Even if it had passed, the article and others demonstrates that the NSA have in the past shown willingness to do everything from blatantly ignoring the law, to have executive orders passed to legalise activities Congress have not approved of, so there is little incentive to apply broad, gross pressure even when facing the threat of bills targeting them.
3. Timing. They may very well believe that accepting curtailment in the short term given the post-Snowden climate is a better way of riding out the storm. Easier to apply "gentle pressure" once the storm has passed, to quietly expand their legal headroom again.
This means I also think koops is somewhat wrong: Most politicians probably don't fear the NSA all that much, because the NSA have had no reason to make the politicians fear them. They're not backed up against the wall, facing the threat of legal action or being shut down. Broadly applied fear is dangerous because it risks creating broad opposition of people who are united in fear of what has made itself a common enemy.
Even if fear becomes their only weapon, NSA only needs to make the right politicians fear them to stop bills, or get executive orders passed. Whether they have, or if they're simply so confident in their effective immunity against actually following decisions from Congress is another matter.
A good occasion to practice one of those n log n sorting algorithms manually.
1. Split all the pages into piles for page 1, page 2, page 3, etc...
2. Look at highest page pile first, because it would have least number of documents, work backward through page piles searching for matching previous page until you extract all of the pages[0] for that document.
[0] If pages were heavily blanked out, identification might have been difficult.
It's possible the room is a faraday cage, but not likely.
Budget? Yes. I don't dispute that. Know what they're doing? Clearly they don't.
(Snowden suggests they don't and that they have some level of incompetence).
They'd search you going in and searchyou going out and probably observe you while you're there.
You should operate under the assumption that the NSA are not idiots.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/01/feedtrough_ns...
This is iust one example, but there are many more, of backdoors introduced by NSA into commercial equipment.
Radix sort doesn't require comparisons, instead you examine the first digit and drop into one of 10 buckets. You then recurse on each bucket.
I think that'd be less frustrating than trying to do quicksort on such a large pile.
At this point (ironically) it may be fair to start treating them as one of the biggest threats to the functioning of democracy in the US.
Not terrorists, not violent militia, not soft money, not Income inequality - but an agency with virtually unchecked powers, opaque budget, no due process that Govt. Officials themselves daren't speak against for fear of embarrassment or worse.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/10/02/repor...
https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1304...
For my part, for example, I have met various relatively low level Norwegian politicians and trade union people that have huge networks. These low level politicians, for example have met people with vastly more influence, such as Castro (communist politician who moved to Cuba; these days he's converted to Islam, become a social democrat, and runs a shipping company in Norway..), Mao (trade union guy who has a picture of himself with Obama from some meet and greet in the 60's), Obama (hand shakes during some visit), the new secretary general of NATO (he's ex-Norwegian prime minister for the labour party - every member of parliament in recent years and most Labour party members have met him, so most Norwegians will only have one step between them and him), the Dalai Lama (large numbers of Norwegian politicians have met him), just to mention some random names, though most of them will have done little more than shake hands.
Extend it one level, and the people I know will have worked closely with people who have worked closely with the people mentioned.
Most people will be able to find paths to someone that the NSA could use to justify surveillance if they want to in 3 degrees or less. Of course, in most cases these people will not have discussed anything that would give the NSA a legitimate reason for interest.
So the 3-degrees thing basically amounts to saying they can conduct surveillance of everyone they bloody well please, as long as they can be bothered to identify a suitable connection.
We know the NSA and GHCQ really do get involved in forums like this to push their propaganda. I would have thought that was a seriously paranoid conspiracy theory a year ago but it isn't is it?
If they were sending people off to concentration camps, I'd be cautious. As it is, I'd be proud to be on some NSA list. Come on, let's do it, NSA. What exactly are you going to with me on such a list, browse my porn?
What? These numbers are clearly wrong.
That suggests a "Drake Equation" type estimate, probably something similar to:
density = current_disk_density * moores_law * official_estimate_of_project_lifetime
total = building_area * density * "round up for reporters/management" * propaganda multiplier
round_up_to_next_si_prefix(total)
I was intrigued by the mention of the "Black Chamber," alias the Cipher Bureau and the predecessor of the NSA. Looking it up, I was further intrigued by mentions of institutional cryptography in Elisabethan England and so on. If I'm interested in this at a purely layman's level (I'm more into the history than the practical implications today) what books or essays would you recommend my reading?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Black_Chamber
Enigma: The Battle for the Code (I think that's the one I read)
http://www.amazon.com/Enigma-Battle-Code-Hugh-Sebag-Montefio...
I know I read one specifically about breaking Purple, but can't seem to track it down (I don't believe it's the William F. Friedman bio).
I haven't read this one, but it also seems to be what you're looking for (and has a decent rating):
http://www.amazon.com/Code-Book-Secret-History-Code-breaking...
(You might check a public/university library for these and related titles--that's where I found them.)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Codebreakers [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_disk
The Code Book covers diverse historical topics including the Man in the Iron Mask, Arabic cryptography, Charles Babbage, the mechanisation of cryptography, the Enigma machine, and the decryption of Linear B and other ancient writing systems.
Later sections cover the development of public-key cryptography. Some of this material is based on interviews with participants, including persons who worked in secret at GCHQ.[2]
It puts the Code Book to shame.
[0]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Codebreakers-Comprehensive-Communi...
"Others contained clues to a secret trips that Friedman had made to Switzerland, where he helped the agency gain backdoor access into encryption systems that a Swiss company was selling to foreign countries."
"The owner(s) of Crypto AG are unknown, supposedly even to the managers of firm, and they hold their ownership through bearer shares"
A Brief History of NSA Backdoors. http://ethanheilman.tumblr.com/post/70646748808/a-brief-hist...
"And they call me paranoid."
Glad my phone, and my messages are encrypted. Filevault on my laptop.
A good discussion is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7062489
There's a lot of practicality questions in terms of battery life, expense, convenience to carry around, but for certain security scenarios it seems like a step forward.