The Whole Haystack: The N.S.A. claims it needs access to all our phone records

Only if a nation builds a domestic spy program, and intrusive and expensive domestic security apparatus, and starts multi-trillion dollar wars in places that say Graveyard of Empires right on the label. Who would be such idiots?

And to say that Afghanistan was caused by 9/11 is a total reversal of what actually happened, 9/11 happened because of CIA involvement in Afghanistan.

How many people could have been saved from heart disease with the same amount of money?

As other commenters pointed out, it's only efficient at disrupting a nation if the nation itself decides to disrupt itself.

The right way to react to a terrorist attack is to ignore it. Simple as that. You chase the perpetrators like ordinary members of an organized crime group. Anything above that is achieving the terrorists' plan.

All the money America spends on "War on Terror", including NSA, is actually the cost of 9/11. If the US wanted to really effectively prevent further terrorist attacks, it would defund the NSA. Right now all that counterterrorism measures are only actively inviting further attacks - everyone can see that it takes only a bunch of civilian casualties to make the nation go completely nuts and drive itself to destruction.

I'm not saying that wasn't a bad play of words.

You may be willing to give up your liberty, but I, and many with me, are not. Terrorists are trolls; dear people of US and the world, please stop feeding them. The same goes for war mongers of all stripes.

Fix a bug and keep the fix in reserve (to be applied via a latency-privilidged backdoor and/or traffic filter if a large-scale attack is detected) and you've parried the first blow in a cyberwar. This has the added advantage that you don't have to nag people to install the fix.

Declaring that software vendors are liable for these mistakes does a few things: 1) Requires that an explicit threat be identified to justify the economic hardship 2) Depending on how the policy is applied, can slow the development of the golden goose US internet industry 3) May not be that effective in actually closing security holes (hard to say) 4) May not be politically possible (hard to say). Additionally, in this framework, the executive branch would consider PRISM and related programs components of a national defense strategy that they can exert direct control over rather than relying on civilians.

I'm not completely sure of my theory. The world situation is complex and I think it's a little from column A and a little from column B (state aggression and terrorism respectively). However, assuming it's somewhat correct, the politicians have been trying to keep the heat down for obvious reasons (not causing a trade or actual war). South-east asia has been kind of uppity lately but there are plenty of other states to worry about as well.

You do see politicians talking about elements of cyber war in the news from time to time, but they rarely make it a centerpiece. I don't know if that's because it's not that consequential or because making it a huge issue is aggressive. Very often you see it reported that a high level US defense, state, or executive official, as part of a larger package of talks, speaks to heads of state or their generals about cyber war but the details of that are not disclosed. This makes it seem as though the issue is small as much more ink is spilled on the other parts of the talks. However, it's hard to know just how large a component it is. Could be huge, could be small.

My premise is in part based on the concept that administration officials are acutely aware that we're having an incredible peace dividend right now. Every time we have a war the public has to get invested in, it is insanely destructive. This is somewhat undercut by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but it's widely commented on how that although they cost over a trillion dollars and a scary number of lives on both sides, the public has been mostly disengaged and it's been basically peacetime over on US territory. That gives politicians freedom to basically do what they want without much pushback and without substantially hurting the economy.

If war spending is ~1.5T over 14 years (https://www.nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/) (~107B/yr), and the current US GDP is ~17.55T/yr (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States) this amounts to 0.6% of US GDP (and shrinking). In comparison, US GDP growth ranges between -2% to 5% over the past 15 years and is more often positive (it was only negative during the sub-prime mortgage crisis years). A war with significant damage on the home front would not simply reduce growth, but could set us back decades in economic and human damage (drawing comparisons to the damage done to China, Europe, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Japan in 20th century, some of them have caught back up, but it took decades and they still are emotionally scarred over it). Fwiw, these numbers also emphasize how insanely mind bogglingly rich this country is.

Would a cyber war be damaging enough to force the sorts of measures NSA has implemented to be taken? Would cyber war effectively complement other kinds of tactics on the part of an aggressor? Overall, I'm not sure, but it seems plausible if you think a major act of aggression is likely. How likely is that right now? I don't know. I do know that over a long period of time (decades, a century), acts of war have historically been a near certainty though the particular actor is hard to foresee.

Of course, I'd like to reiterate that I'm still not convinced that these spying measures are required and it is very scary that such large scale changes to the nature of our communications have been done with little public debate. It's very anti-democratic in so many ways and I appreciate what Mr. Snowden has done for the public.

There's no way to eradicate "stateless radical Islamists", or even Al Qaeda (anyone can wave a black flag labeled "Al Qaeda"). So unlike a war on (say) Japan, the war on Al Qaeda can't end until a critical mass of politicians make the irrational decision to go on the record as saying we're finished prosecuting terrorists.

Historically, US foreign policy seems to get in the worst trouble when it declares itself a military adversary of concepts as opposed to states. See, for instance, "communism".

But the media loves its ratings, the more terror the better for them and governments love to push through their pet laws and terrorists (and child pornographers, software pirates and other undesirables) are convenient hooks to hang those on.

However, when you follow the news media and the politician speeches you are led to believe that we're all going to die from a terrorist attack any minute now. In my opinion, the numbers don't support that.

Moreover, it's this perception of an urgent threat that governments worldwide use to justify an unprecedented curtailment of civil rights (privacy, presumption of innocence, etc.).

So yes, the comparison may be seen as facetious or tasteless.

But at this point I'm far more worried about the NSA and the increasingly commonplace "us vs them" rhetoric, than about being harmed by a terrorist.

And judging by the last 13 years, rather succesfully too.

The US has not gone on a global campaign to install lightning rods everywhere, nor have they declared a War on Thunder.

Instead they are happily responding to terrorists' incitements in the most desirable way: creating the atmosphere to breed the current and the next generation of terrorists. (The domestic ones have been so incompetent that they've needed assistance from the FBI with their plans and attempts.[0][1])

0: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/fbi-terrorist-in...

1: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/terror-factory-f...

Note: the two links contain mostly the same material.

I can't find that spreadsheet back right now, however, here's a different article (presumably based on the same dataset) that provides a table with "Fatalities per Country":

http://www.terrorismanalysts.com/pt/index.php/pot/article/vi...

It only goes till 2007, that's why the number is slightly lower (3339).

That's very altruistic, and only a pure coincidence that an American defence contractor, who is purer than the driven snow, should get the work instead.

Then they're even more incompetent than any of us could have ever imagined.

When Obama had the CIA kill a US citizen, they wrote a legal memo about it.

The rule of law is still worshiped in the US.

It helps that the leadership of these agencies are political appointees and then rank and file are just regular bureaucrats.

The guys at the NSA aren't some secret cabal. It's the nerdy dood you play Settles of Caatan with at a game club in DC.

I also think controlling public opinion is a lot harder than you are imagining. Even in N. Korea the people generally know their country is bullshiting them.

Hand-wavy extrapolations of technological progress are far from sufficient justification for giving up civil liberties. We need actual, public evidence of a sizable threat, actual public proof that the agencies asking for this invasive power can be trusted, and most importantly, actual public proof that these invasive powers will solve the problem they purport to solve at less social and financial cost than any other approach.

That's a huge assumption. A totalitarian state comes at a cost far larger than civilian lives from terrorism. You are pretending that innovation will continue at the same rate without an open and free society.