The NSA keeps using this "54 terror plots thwarted" rhetoric, but there has never been any information released to back up that claim.
From Sen. Patrick Leahy, after reading the full classified list:
“We've heard over and over again the assertion that 54 terrorist plots were thwarted” by the two programs, Leahy told Alexander at the Judiciary Committee hearing this month. “That's plainly wrong, but we still get it in letters to members of Congress, we get it in statements. These weren't all plots and they weren't all thwarted. The American people are getting left with the inaccurate impression of the effectiveness of NSA programs.”
(http://www.propublica.org/article/claim-on-attacks-thwarted-...)
Further, even assuming that number is correct, how many people do you figure die in the average successful terrorist plot? Let's say 100 as a high average.
That means 300,000,000 Americans (and billions of foreigners) are having their rights violated and wallets emptied via taxation every day to save 5400 lives over the course of 14 years.
Admittedly, it's 55% more likely than getting struck by lightning, but...
According to this[1] list, 100 would be vastly over estimating. Even including 9/11, and disregarding all incidents with no fatalities, the average based on the GTD data is about 12.5. If you are willing to concede that 9/11 was a once-in-ever event that is unlikely to be matched, then the number drops below 2.
And that's probably still a vast overstatement of the likely fatalities for any given plot, given that 2103 of the 2381 recorded by the GTD have 0 fatalities.
My assumption is that they took the total fatalities for the incident, then divided it between the two. So in actuality, the number of fatalities was 2,764, but they divided it between the two sites of attack.
That's my assumption though and it could be completely off base.
Ahh yeah makes sense. Both the summaries have the same number stating the combined total of both towers (2603). Best I can figure is 2603 + 88 (Flight 11) + 59 (Flight 175) + 10 hijackers = 2760
I'm not saying your conclusion isn't wrong, but your argument probably is - largely because there are many costs of terrorism beyond simply loss of life - it's an incredibly efficient way to disrupt a nation.
For example, some estimates of the cost of 9/11 (I think including the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan) suggest that each American is out to the tune of $10,000 [0]. If the NSA were able to prevent one 9/11 style event, they'd in one step justify their budget for 300 years (if you ignore Iraq and Afghanistan, it goes down to 75 years, but in many ways at least Afghanistan was very much caused by 9/11).
> it's an incredibly efficient way to disrupt a nation
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.
You can't really blame the terrorists for the response. Spain, France, Norway and Germany have all dealt with terrorism over the last decades and not a single one of them has invaded other countries in response to such an attack.
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.
Clearly different circumstances however Spain, France, Germany, Norway all invaded Afghanistan, and Spain and Norway also invaded Iraq. Perhaps not as a direct response, though.
To your second point, it's clearly a very complicated blame game, but trying to distill it down to fit your own point is not helpful. We can easily follow the chain of events backwards - for example had the USSR not invaded Afghanistan, this might have all been avoided.
Certainly the trigger point was the Taliban refusing to hand over Bin Laden, thus providing a safe haven for him and other like minded folk.
This all seems to be besides my original point, which was that terror attacks clearly cost far more than the lives of the people killed, and so arguing that the benefit of the NSA is minimal by considering only a tiny fragment of its potential benefit is fallacious.
> and so arguing that the benefit of the NSA is minimal by considering only a tiny fragment of its potential benefit is fallacious.
It's indeed fallacious because there is no benefit of the NSA at all - its current activities are the very cost of 9/11 attacks. Civilian deaths are not the goal of a terror attack, they're just collateral damage, means to an end. The goal of an attack is to, as you wrote, "disrupt a nation" - which is not something that the bombs do, it's something that the nation does to itself by having a crazy overreaction.
That only works if you assume that there's only ever one attack. If it thwarts another, then it's benefiting. In any case, I wouldn't really argue that the NSA 'disrupts' the nation at all - the spending on it is only a little larger than at the end of the cold war, and apart from the recent news stories only a very small minority will actually be affected by it in their daily lives.
The reason Osama bin Laden wore that united states military jacket is because it was given to him during the CIA armament of the afghanis against the russians...
> it's an incredibly efficient way to disrupt a nation.
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?
that's not really the cost of the terrorism, though. that's the cost of the cowardly, panicked response. other countries have responded to terrorism with more dignity and poise, and it's cost them less money.
Other developed country have arguably not suffered a proportional injury from terrorism (in terms of deaths per capita per incident). The nearest example I can think of is Norway's massacre carried out y Anders Brievik, and it's questionable as to whether an atrocity by an individual actor meets the operational definition of terrorism, since the threat of future attacks could be neutralized by the capture of a single individual; 'terror' surely implies a non-zero risk of future attack, as opposed to the 'horror' of a previous one that has a zero probability of being repeated.
They could also comply with the law, especially important laws like the Fourth Amendment. That's another option they have.
edit: it's occurred to me there's a huge flaw in this claim:
Preventing the cowardly, panicked response
isn't the NSA's department.
The NSA has lied about the effectiveness of its mass data collection, claiming that it foiled terrorist plots. The claims don't actually hold up under investigation.
But in the process of exaggerating the effectiveness of this particular alleged solution to terrorist danger, they also exaggerated the pervasiveness of that danger, which probably did make the panicked, cowardly response in question both more panicked and more cowardly.
Come on, even comedians know better than to think they are actually breaking any laws. Why take that risk when you can just legalize whatever you want to do without telling anyone?
That's not the NSA's problem, though. By all means criticise the US as a whole for that. I'm less in agreement with your second point - you can easily apply it to any slightly frivolous spending.
If petrol usage efficiency in the US went up by 10% for example (should be easily achievable for not much cost), in principle the money saved overall would be over $10 billion in 2014.
Fair, but there have to be some diminishing returns there. If there had been two 9/11 style events in short succession, would we have gone to twice as many wars?
We didn't really go to war because of 9/11. It was a direct result of existing interventionist foreign policy. 9/11 just escalated an ongoing conflict.
You're right, though, the impact of each successive event is less.
I'm not saying your conclusion isn't wrong, but your argument probably is
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.
You are comparing an intangible number to a different tangible number, but ignoring the intangible side of the second number. What is the intangible costs to Americans for TSA's security theater? Lost time, lost items, lost privacy, lost security, even lost lives?
So I was reading an article about information Snowden released the other day about how the US is gearing up for cyberwar. It occurred to me that it has to be obvious that NSA is aware aware of its limitations in performing counterterrorism using this needle/haystack approach. While there have been some documented abuses of the system, it's not clear that they have been systematically useful to its operators on a scale large enough to justify the program's spending and civil rights implications. President Obama is a constitutional scholar, but he backs the rhetoric even as he tries to close Guantanamo Bay.
I wonder if this concept of total information awareness justified by terrorism is in fact primarily a way to set up information warfare capabilities in a way that is palatable to the public. E.g. PRISM is a way to monitor network traffic globally, very useful in a war. NSA and the executive branch clearly believe they are doing something so righteous that it justifies excessive breaches of civil liberties, lying to congress, and more. While I strongly disagree with them, I am beginning to suspect that these are preparations for some kind of global cyber war. If the preparations are good, the executive branch would be convinced that history would vindicate them, otherwise I'm fairly sure without sufficient justification, historians would see this as a 1984 scenario and punish their legacies harshly.
Highly recommend "@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex" [1] by Shane Harris which goes into fascinating detail on how the "US is gearing up for cyberwar"
Wouldn't part of preparing for cyber war include shoring up your local defenses?
But instead of increasing security requirements or making software vendors somehow liable for bugs they produce, they're still going with lowest common denominator tactics for defense contract procurement.
Because of this, I have a hard time seeing this as preparing for cyber war in any way other than aggression tactics. I see little evidence of increased defense focus at home.
Fix a bug, two more take its place, your enemy researches the two still out there instead of the one you fixed and you're right back where you started.
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.
You know, if we'd used a grown-up protocol like X.400 as the standard for Internet email instead of the hacked-up SMTP, there would be no spam now? Same for TCP/IP, HTTP, yadda yadda. We know how to do secure computing. Just everyone prefers convenience - users, and developers who want easy implementations.
tl;dr: Uncertain effectiveness of proposed measures, proposed measures are not directly controllable by the executive branch. Not totally sure of proposed explanation, but some of it seems plausible.
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.
Maybe it seems like I'm nitpicking, but I think most of the attacks against the 54 number are strawmen. Here's the actual figures that were claimed (from [1]):
Gen. Keith Alexander said these programs enabled the United States to disrupt 54 "events," 42 of which "involved disrupted plots."
Of those 54:
12 involved cases of material support to terrorists;
50 lead to arrests or detentions;
25 occurred in Europe;
11 were in Asia;
5 were in Africa;
13 had a homeland nexus.
Forty-one of the terrorist activities did not involve events in the United States, Alexander said.
Alexander went on to say that in 53 of the 54 cases, data collected under Section 702 provided the initial tip to "unravel the threat stream." He said that almost half of terrorist reporting comes from Section 702, ...
... and the associated infographic: [2]. Your own link states that the NSA claimed 42 plots and 12 instances of material support. Senator Leahy's quote speaks more to both the media game of telephone than the NSA's claims and the fact that the figures from the Section 215 program (bulk phone metadata) were being conflated with the Section 702 program (PRISM).
As a result, this article and a whole slew of other articles try to tie the 54 plots in with the Section 215 program, when right from the beginning General Alexander was stating that the overwhelming majority came from Section 702 collection. Draw what conclusion you may want from those numbers - three commissions have done so over the last year and concluded that PRISM was incredibly valuable[3], but the bulk phone records not so much[4][5] - but, that doesn't say much about the 54 number.
But you're saying one unconstitutional, immoral, wasteful program has been deemed useful by a corrupt and inept body, and the other hasn't. That's a really great idea I'll consider carefully.
That's hilarious. It doesn't sound like you know anything about the PCLOB.
This group of political appointees presided over the genesis of the largest surveillance/propaganda program in the history of the world. Corrupt and inept seems fair.
A board of political appointees confirmed by Congress that didn't exist until 2008 presided over the genesis of the largest surveillance/propaganda program in the history of the world? Now I'm curious...
That's the wrong date. Again, it doesn't seem you know anything about the PCLOB. Basic information is on Wikipedia, if you ever look.
Do you have any point besides making endless discursive asides about how much you simultaneously believe and disbelieve the PCLOB? I'm starting to think conversing with you is a complete waste of time.
> Basic information is on Wikipedia, if you ever look.
First member was appointed in January 2008. Go reread it.
> Do you have any point besides making endless discursive asides ... I'm starting to think conversing with you is a complete waste of time.
My thoughts exactly - It's not worth my time conversing with someone whose argument is basically "No, you're wrong. You obviously don't know anything about the subject." It's been fun - I'm not going to waste any further time on this thread.
My point is that the government cannot be expected to competently judge itself. That is our task as citizens, if you want to use those reports as the basis of your ill-informed opinion, go ahead.
... and you can't seem to follow through with your research - if you read past the first paragraph, you'll see that the 2004 PCLOB was completely disbanded by Congress and replaced with an entirely separate organization whose members were approved by Congress rather than appointed solely by the President. A cursory glance at their own website would tell you the same in more detail. Ironically, that was entire point I was making - people shouldn't assume take the first document they read on a given subject (or in this case, the first paragraph of the first document they read) and assume it's the complete story.
You'll note that I even "Draw what conclusion you may want from those numbers" in my original post. I offered those three reports because out of everything I've read on the subject, those were the most comprehensive. So far, you've offered a whole lot of ad hominem, a Wikipedia link and an argument that boils down to "it's a government agency, therefore corrupt and inept". If you're going to make a point, try backing it up with an actual argument and ditching the insults.
On principle, I have no real problem with the NSA having access to phone records (pen register) for purposes of combating actual terrorism. I deem that an acceptable intrusion. Besides, my phone company already has those records and uses them for their profit.
The problem is that the NSA can no longer be trusted to confine its use to terrorism. Drug investigations, immigration issues, even IRS investigations are using this data. I half expect speeding to be enforced via phone metadata (GPS). Snowden has also shown us that untold thousands of people have access to this data with little oversight. I trust actual spies. I do not trust thousands of twenty-somethings for whom promotion depends on finding some way of turning my phone records into evidence of crime.
Nor do I want my phone records used in any non-NSA security checks. I work in a field (legal) where I do occasionally come into contact with very bad people. It was a legal clinic. He was my client. The fact that we spoke regularly should not follow me forever.
>>On principle, I have no real problem with the NSA having access to phone records (pen register) for purposes of combating actual terrorism.
Right, if they actually _first_ determine that a person is a terrorist, _then_ they start spying, that'd be one thing. But instead, what we have now(or at least what they're asking for) is almost like this:
Basically, no one person/organization should have this data at their immediate finger tips. It will be abused; it's human nature. A more acceptable way to do this is let Apple/Google make their impossible-to-break-encryption-whatever stuff, then when law enforcement gives a warrant for a particular phone number, that specific phone gets pushed a firmware update or something that disables encryption. Pre-emptively/retroactively having access to everyone's phone data at all times is bad.
Of course, if you wait for people to commit acts of terror before you start spying on them, you've kinda missed the point of spying.
The fix here is access control. When we have a problem like terror, civil liberties are the first thing to get thrown under the bus - and trying to fight that will generally end badly. Too many people complain that the NSA has these unconstitutional wire tapping programs - where they have next to no chance of making even the smallest difference to the existence of those programs.
What people should actually be doing is meeting half way and attempting to put up firewalls on the data, to make sure it can't be abused where possible. So no giving the data to other agencies without a warrant - monitor the people who have access, and make sure that if they do searches for specific people, that's logged and audited.
Most reasonable people would probably be fine with having some of their communications monitored, were it in some way guaranteed that their data would only ever to be considered in any detail (i.e. by a human) if they were seriously accused of being a terrorist. Personally, I can easily accept that there are certain cases in which I'd have to give up some of my freedoms in the interest of the nation.
My concern is that this data might made more widely available - for example in the DEA's parallel construction cases (or with RIPA in the UK) - where it's clearly being used in ways against the spirit of the law. Were the NSA clearly told - yes, you can collect this data, but you can't share it with other branches of the government and you may only use it for finding terrorists, that's fine in my opinion - unless I'm a terrorist I'm never even going to find out that I've been monitored, and no one will be able to use the data against me.
There is a practical, structural problem with the "war on terrorism" even as you've reframed it.
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".
Strange that you picked that example, considering it's the only instance where you could hope to argue that the 'war' was successful. You don't see much Communism these days, at least not in the tradition of Stalin and Mao.
On the other hand drug use is still a worthy adversary despite the US having waged a long and bitter war of attrition against it for decades. Also poverty, obesity, probably a bunch of other pet struggles we appropriated the word 'war' for.
You're absolutely right that it's an open-ended commitment. And whether it's worth it--probably not to the degree we've spent money and lives on it, and distorted our internal politics in response to it. But I think the trends out there are deeply troubling. In 100 years, I want countries like the one my family is from to be like California, not Saudi Arabia. I think that would be good for them, but also good for us. But thanks to radical Islamists, the world is moving in the wrong direction. And if operations like ISIS can acquire and hold territory in countries that are theoretically friendly to the West, I think those are the kind of brush-fires that Western countries should undertake an open-ended commitment to putting out.
The excuse for this massive intrusion is terrorism but:
> Nearly all of the highest-profile domestic terrorism plots in the United States since 9/11 featured the "direct involvement" of government agents or informants, a new report says.
Exactly. Looking at high level stats one would imagine FBI are just so great at preventing terrorism. Look at all these foiled bridge explosions.
Except if you look a bit deeper you start seeing a different picture. Infiltrating mosques, preying on the weaker and feeble-minded.
If it weren't tragic and depressing it would be quite funny actually because of this bit:
> Yet, far from succeeding, Monteilh eventually so unnerved Orange County's Muslim community that that they got a restraining order against him. In an ironic twist, they also reported Monteilh to the FBI: unaware he was in fact working undercover for the agency.
He was such a dickhead that basically he got himself reported back to the FBI.
Counting deaths is an invalid way of looking at the impact of terrorism. The whole point of terrorism is to impose s greater mental impact than physical one.
Now you can say that people should be more rational and not care more about 17 people killed in car accidents than the same killed in the Charlie Hebdo attacks. But they do.
Actually people don't care much more for either. But the media will blow up the terror attacks way out of proportion and in return people will be caring more about them. Terrorism takes 3 parties to play, terrorists, governments and media. If the two that should be wiser refuse to play ball the whole thing falls apart.
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.
No they wouldn't, just like they weren't interested in people killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now they aren't interested in people dying in Ukraine - if something is common, happens often, then it doesn't sell, period.
For a complete perspective, one should post the deaths caused by US on foreign grounds (iraq, Afghanistan, Servia/Kosovo, others?).
I'm not saying this justifies terror attacks in the US or anywhere, but that it's so sad that we're in 21st century, and we still see people get killed by other people for whatever reasons, but mainly for resources(oil?) or religion.
Just to clarify where this number comes from: Wikipedia tells me the number of deaths caused by the 9/11 attacks was "2,996 (2,977 victims, 19 hijackers)". Where do I find 2953?
I think he did what I did: sorted by fatalities, found the top 3 which were 9/11 and added them up. He was missing flight 93 which would bring the total to 2997. Here are the relevant incident summaries:
Wikipedia has a bunch of random news articles as sources and even it's own entry for casualties saying 2606 at WTC, 125 at Pentagon, and "About 292 people[citation needed]" killed by "burning debris and falling bodies" on the street.
There was a google spreadsheet that had summed it up, embedded into (iirc) a Washington Post article. The article was quite convoluted though, that's why I linked to the data source instead.
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":
FWIW, I find the comparison to getting struck by lighting to be somewhat facetious. Sure, goes to show just how unlikely it is to be killed in a terrorist attack, but I wager that the purpose of a terrorist attack is often more than just the immediate deaths.
Every single terror victim is a tragedy and one too many.
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.
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.).
Exactly right. But why? Is this curtailment of civil rights an emergent behavior, or is it on purpose? Back in 2001, I was pretty shocked at how fast the PATRIOT Act went into law: it was signed Oct 26, 2001. Was there some kind of potential candidate law lying around, ready to be put into the hopper for Congressional approval? If so, who wrote it, and why?
> I wager that the purpose of a terrorist attack is often more than just the immediate deaths.
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])
I feel like I'm stating the obvious a bit here to HN, but does anybody else think this might have more to do with something completely removed from terrorism. Like tracking the intricacies of various global markets, cultural movements, politicians, judges, activists and other influencers in society. Like basically an opportunity to see everybody at the table's cards (including your friends) in order to maximize power? Basically arranging enough small advantages through calculation in order to statistically improve success in all manner of maneuvers. The ability to further reduce any semblance of the democratic process by taking your average politician's polling strategy to a much higher level?
Is there a book on this that anybody recommends? Is this what Art of War is about or something?
It is a misconception that the NSA is an anti-terrorism agency.
It is a general signal intelligence agency. It's job is the gather as much foreign intelligence as possible. And that sure includes:Like tracking the intricacies of various global markets, cultural movements, politicians, judges, activists and other influencers in society. Like basically an opportunity to see everybody at the table's cards (including your friends) in order to maximize power?
Where you go wrong is assuming that means they have some dastardly plan to subvert global democracy.
The government just really wants good intel. They want to know if Russian sanctions are working. They want to know if N. Korea is really just bullshiting or do they mean it. They want to know how much longer with Germany prop up Southern Europe. They want to know if Cuba is serious about opening up trade. They want to know if some French scientist is about to develop software that beats US electronic warfare defenses on their AEGIS destroyers.
Great response, thank you. You're right, it's hard during this current media push to remember that these organizations aren't just fighting terror. I suppose that is the easiest way to market them to keep the public from getting to concerned over it.
What if they are using the intel they are gathering in order to influence the public's opinion as effectively as possible? It's that sort of power consolidation that worries me and makes me question when an allegiance to the democratic nation that created them starts to fade away.
How does a free nation effectively control an intelligence agency like this to prevent it from slowly usurping all the seats of power? It seems to me that with the expanding technological capabilities of our modern age, we are feeding our guard dog a new super food and it's going to bite our neck if we try to slow down the input and tighten it's leash.
It's possible, but there is no indication that the US security agencies "go rouge." The NSA might be stretching the 4th Amendment but it does so at the command of the President and it does within the bounds of the law.
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.
I hope you are right. Ultimately I'm not opposed to American intelligence agencies. I'm aware that there are big threats beyond terrorism and it's important for us to have the best team with the best resources. If things escalate with China for example I'm willing to accept that sacrifices will have to be made to our concept of privacy as a wartime measure. If we have to pull pages out of Art of War to win this thing then I guess that's that.
I just worry that they have in fact gone rouge and have lost track of their real duty. Snowden's critique of citizen surveillance aside, his critique of America's ability to protect ourselves from China after crippling our nation's encryption efforts is what really bothers me. I'm worried that the agency, in an attempt to tighten it's grip on the western world's communication, is missing the important window to instead begin locking things down. They are missing our chance to get our corporations, institutions and infrastructure encrypted properly to protect civilians from cyberwar fallout. Protecting us from a modern war modelled in part on America's WWII strategic bombing campaign of German civilians in an era when we no longer have the geographical advantage of two oceans keeping us safe.
I think they got a taste of the power that comes with total information (not unlike the advertising world is with leaders like Zuckerburg [but thats another post...]) and are not willing to give it up and smarten up.
Really? Because it seems to me like they are chugging along just fine. They have plenty of wiggle room unlike real adversaries like Snowden. If they've seen a dip in public support I'm sure short and long term projections have it not only solved but completely countered. They may never convince the HN crowd but the HN crowd doesn't need to be convinced.
Whether this is "good enough" for them to keep doing what they do wasn't the question. The question was whether they were doing their best to influence public opinion.
Sure, but all that info is power. I understand why the US government wants power over other states, as distasteful as it is.
However, power corrupts, and I don't feel the government needs additional power over its own people. And I especially don't feel that a specific department needs power over people that just so happen to be politicians that might someday oppose that department.
Foreign intelligence is used to interrogate/arrest/kill people. Only powers that are granted can be misused, we as citizens can take anything we want away from the government.
What if they are lying to the officials? Or what if they have information on the officials? What if they don't have information on the officials but the officials have been convinced that they probably do?
That's an interesting spin on what the article said. To quote:
According to a European Parliament report, published in 2001, America's National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted faxes and phone calls between Airbus, Saudi Arabian Airlines and the Saudi government in early 1994. The NSA found that Airbus agents were offering bribes to a Saudi official to secure a lion's share for Airbus in modernising Saudi Arabian Airlines' fleet. The planes were in a $6 billion deal that Edouard Balladur, France's then prime minister, had hoped to clinch on a visit to see King Fahd in January 1994. He went home empty-handed.
James Woolsey, then director of the Central Intelligence Agency, recounted in a newspaper article in 2000 how the American government typically reacted to intelligence of this sort. “When we have caught you [Europeans]...we go to the government you're bribing and tell its officials that we don't take kindly to such corruption,” he wrote. Apparently this (and a direct sales pitch from Bill Clinton to King Fahd) swung the aircraft part of the deal Boeing's and McDonnell Douglas's way.
“When we have caught you [Europeans]...we go to the government you're bribing and tell its officials that we don't take kindly to such corruption,”
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.
I guess McDonnell Douglas was still smarting from that deal in '79 when they were indicted for... bribing the officials of 5 foreign countries (including nl).
The people in power has one priority: to preserve their power at all cost.
It is human, or even social animal nature. Any social animals have alpha males,an alpha females. They fight for power.
In Politics any politician has a dossier with the life and errors of each adversary. Now the dossier is digital.
PS: I met a translator for governments, very well paid. This person left her job because he did not want to know what she was. She thought it put her life on risk.
Exactly. This is about finding the nail that sticks up and pounding it flat, before it can cause any trouble, such a movement for changing, say, distribution of wealth.
Instead, the result will be that change is suppressed until there is a large scale rupture.
This covers what I see as one of the biggest reasons for stopping the collection: It simply does not work. We are "winning" the war on terror just like we are "winning" the war on drugs in that we aren't making a dent at all and some argue that our actions in both fields actually spur on the exact activities they are meant to curb/destroy.
Don't get me wrong, I don't trust them with the data in the first place but even if I did it's been proven again and again that our privacy is being invaded and no positives are coming out of it. The NSA would have a much stronger position if it was "Yes, you have no privacy but there is also no terror" instead we have no privacy and terror attacks abound.
Several powerful trends have aligned to profoundly
change the way that the world works. Technology
now allows stateless groups to organize, recruit, and fund
themselves in an unprecedented fashion. That, coupled
with the extreme difficulty of finding and punishing a stateless group, means that stateless groups are positioned to be lead players on the world stage. They may act on their own,
or they may act as proxies for nation-states that wish to
duck responsibility. Either way, stateless groups are forces
to be reckoned with.
At the same time, a different set of technology trends means that small numbers of people can obtain incredibly lethal power. Now, for the first time in human history, a small group can be as lethal as the largest superpower. Such a group could execute an attack that could kill millions of
people. It is technically feasible for such a group to kill billions of people, to end modern civilization—perhaps even
to drive the human race to extinction.
I encourage anyone to read a relevant paper linked below by Nathan Myhrvold.
The forces you describe have been in effect for more than half a century, and during that time the actual damage we've seen from stateless actors has been miniscule compared to what has been visited on people by their own governments, governments that have been granted too much power out of fear.
We don't need more dragnet surveillance, we need courage and perspective. Yes, there is a possibility that a stateless actor could end the world. There's lots of other ways the world could end too.
There is a trade off between the collective rights of the innocent citizenry and the rights of the victims of the crimes that can be avoided. At some point the cost of civilian lives will exceed the cost of strain on civil liberties.
Technology progress and, ultimately the potential magnitude of destruction, is expanding at an exponential rate. Therefore looking at the past 50 years is synonymous with driving by looking through the rear view of the car.
Your civil liberties will begin to erode. Even if a bill is passed that revokes the rights of the NSA, at some point in the next few decades a destructive event due to technology innovation and commoditization of knowledge will cause these civil liberties to be eroded.
What evidence exists that terrorism has reached or will soon reach such a scale? I see a lot of fear in your comments but not a lot of facts. How will a stateless actor kill billions of people? How will they even come close to matching the terrorism of second hand smoke or car crashes?
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.
Let's state the facts: There are biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons that can kill millions of people today owned by state organizations. Some of these states have questionable long-term motives whether driven by power or resources.
There are stateless organizations that would use those weapons in a moment's notice against the entire population of the United States.
What you are suggesting is that there is no current evidence of weapons of mass destruction being moved or the knowledge and capital required to make such weapons being from a state to a state-less organization. I disagree:
Number of terrorist groups that have demonstrated interest in acquiring a nuclear weapon: 4
Al Qaeda, Chechnya-based separatists, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and Aum Shinrikyo
Number of terrorist groups that may be capable of acquiring and using nuclear weapons: 5
Al Qaeda, North Caucasus-based separatists, Lashkar-e-Tayyib, Hezbollah, Taliban
Number of known groups that have attempted to buy nuclear material on the black market: 2
Aum Shinrikyo and Al Qaeda
Even if so, there is evidence of weapons of such scale in questionable states such as Syria. In addition there is evidence of weapons transfer, albeit not chemical, biological, or nuclear, to stateless organizations.
Millions of people do not have to die to have a substantial impact on a nation. For you what is that number? Is it in a nominal amount of deaths that reach above the amount of second hand smoke or car crashes?
Regardless, from a perspective of economic cost giving up the civil liberty of driving as a result of deaths is not parallel to giving up the civil liberty of someone checking your phone records.
For now you will not be willing to give up your civil liberty since the probability of you being hit by a terrorist attack is low ( I would be willing to wager you to do not live in major metropolitan city). Given the current pace it is a function of time before a stateless organization increases its death count. At that point you will be willing to give up some of your civil liberties.
At that point you will be willing to give up some of your civil liberties.
This is unlikely. Let's assume for the sake of argument that you have satisfied requirement #1 (proof of a threat). #2 (proof of trustworthiness) and #3 (proof of efficacy and best approach) remain unsatisfied. How is reading my email and leaving vulnerabilities in my software going to prevent a non-state group from buying a WMD?
If we ever reach that point it will be a sign that we have totally failed to build a global enlightened society. I remain unconvinced that universal snooping will even help with that at all, let alone be the most effective approach.
> There is a trade off between the collective rights of the innocent citizenry and the rights of the victims of the crimes that can be avoided. At some point the cost of civilian lives will exceed the cost of strain on civil liberties.
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.
You are taking the slippery slope argument. The fact that the NSA would like the access to data mine phone records does not mean we have slipped into a totalitarian state. We have given up civil liberties for the sake of avoiding crimes in the future. I would state that innovation has been at an all time high in this condition within the past decade.
> small numbers of people can obtain incredibly lethal power.
> a small group can be as lethal as the largest superpower.
That's just not true unless you confuse the real world with "24." The only effective weapons against modern superpowers are modern H-bombs, and you need to be able to deliver them.
The Aum cult in Japan was the only case, ever, of a non-state actor to kill or injure a significant number of people with an actual WMD.
This is my take on things. The NSA, via it's domestic spying on US citizen has massive dirt on US Senators and Congressmen which they hold over them. How do you explain the constant watering down of legislation to resolve these issues?
I can understand how Europeans are justifiably upset when Americans talk about reforming the American surveillance apparatus in terms of protecting the rights of Americans, but please understand that this does NOT imply an indifference to the rights of others.
It's simply a practical matter of being honest about the political incentives in the U.S. Enraged Europeans don't vote U.S. congressmen out of office. Enraged Americans do. Until U.S. congressmen feel pressure from those who ultimately employ them, nothing will change.
If you have a problem with the NSA partnering with your government, you should petition your government to stop partnering with the NSA. If the EU has sold you out, get your country to leave the EU. If your country politicians have sold you out, start a revolution and change your country politics.
It is not reasonable to expect the people of the USA to care about european countries before they bother to care about themselves.
do you really need to be storing GB's of log files because you might have a bug in the future?
Yes, to maximize your chances of making the most robust response to a bug or hack, "all the information" needs to be there.
To bring this back to terrorism, it's not about never having another incident like Paris, but being able to recognize the extent of the problem after the fact (who's talking to who?), and being sure your solution solves the problem as far is it can be traced.
it's pretty insane that the conclusions reached after 9/11 were that we had the information to thwart the plot but the information we had wasn't being properly shared between agencies and 14 years later it sounds like while these agencies have unfettered access to even more information, it still isn't being properly shared between agencies. In the mean time American citizens have some of the dust left over from our 4th Amendment rights while non US citizens have less than zero in regards to 4th Amendment rights.
I would much prefer the 4th Amendment rights be honored, and the laws that allow for this catch all surveillance be removed. Instead, allow for exemptions (which might already be /have been for some time in place) where law enforcement can use surveillance and some times go beyond the normal scope when it pertains to an actual investigation and when a impartial judge has signed off on it.
It is my view that the changes that were made in the past make us no safer today and the original problem (agencies not sharing information when pertinent) doesn't seem to be solved and most likely worsened due to the abundance of (irrelevant) information they now have. I think a good analogy of the situation is you've had agencies sifting through piles of needles (somewhat organized) and rather than giving said agencies tools to better organize the needles, we've just dumped a truckload of more needles on top of what we already had.
Call your Congressmen and Senators [1]. If you write to them, do not use a form letter.
In one or two sentences, explain who you are and why your opinion on this is relevant. Ask for their position on the issue. Then, conservatively state your views. Avoid extreme or outraged language.
Last week, I reached out to my senators and Congresswoman about the CISPA bill [2]. The issue found a place on one Senator's evening agenda and prompted a follow-up from the Representative. An upside to this country's low democratic participation is the undiluted return on making the effort to reach out.
Am I the only one who read "sending eighty-five hundred dollars" as "eighty-five _million_ dollars"; only then to skip back to read it as "hundred".
I'm glad to know that we managed to deal terrorism a death blow by making sure these $8500 never reached the Somali militia. Oh wait, we have not even stopped the $8500 to get there.
Seriously, if we want save lives, why not invest all this money where it actually, uhm, saves lives. For example health care. But, hey, that is somehow unamerican.
Or since lightening strikes kill more people than terrorism does, I suggest we also spend all this money to build giant metal-wire tents over all major cities.
It's hard to keep the sarcasm in check with so much paranoia involved.
Citing Section 215 of the Patriot Act is an unusual choice here, as there are many cross-covering legal authorities. (In the article's defense, it points this out).
Assuming folks stayed in for the entire tick-tock of the Somalia example, we're left with the impression that Section 215 hasn't really paid off that much. But where does that really lead us? If we get rid of 215, we still have warrantless collection of both metadata and data.
I think we're looking at this the wrong way. The thing I want to know is this: as an American citizen who is supposed to be in charge of these well-meaning but ill-led folks, how do I stop them from collecting data on myself and other citizens?
We debate these policies one at a time as each law or provision is discussed, but nobody seems to be wrapping it all up into a package or proposal that I can support or vote for.
Living in Brussels with soldiers in the streets now, I wonder - would I mind free govt access to my phone and email if it would have prevented all the crap that happened in Paris?
The attackers in Paris were under surveillance until 6 months before the attack but they were ruled out by French authorities as not a threat.
In addition, the brothers shaved their beards, stopped all unusual activities in public, and purposefully acted like regular Parisians for months before the attack. So passive surveillance wouldn't have made a difference.
Depends on who wants the privacy though. The US government has become increasingly secretive for example. It seems nobody even really knows how much money this surveillance effort is even costing us...
I'm glad I found this post because I enjoyed our dialog and was looking for the fundamental difference between our perspectives.
People change how they act when they are being watched. Is a life lived while watched as free as one in private? Are you willing to argue that a man influenced by the panopticon is just as free under that influence? A life spent avoiding shame, embarrassment and condemnation is an oppressed life if you ask me. It is also a society which will subdue creative and divergent thinking, in turn slowing scientific and cultural progress. Compare Chinese schooling grades in maths and science with their performance on the nobel prize stage. An educational system which enforces strong conformity and strict rules performs well on paper but fails to produce as much innovative thinking.
Just one novel example I came up with while examining PISA scores recently. The negative effects of the panopticon are well documented.
Such thinking, that there is "bad people" and "good people" is a very scary path for a government to walk. "Pose no threat and you have nothing to worry about" is not freedom.
Ultimately I believe a nation's amount of freedom should be determined by how it treats its dissidents and marginalized people, not by how it treats the loyalists. In a free nation I shouldn't have to be loyal to conventional behaviour to feel free. The two do not go hand in hand.
the real danger with the NSA is Moore's Law. you can't do a greal deal with this data at the point of collection, but collecting it for a few decades, while Moore's Law ramps up, will put you in an incredible position of overwhelming power at the end of that time.
look at how J. Edgar Hoover obsessively spied on American politicians, and imagine him doing so in 2035, backed up with decades of data, plus computing power as superior to ours as ours is superior to 1995's.
Actually make everything collected actually fully public, with no exclusions on who is collected from. If it's collected, it's public. After all, the collection was paid for with public monkey. No need to put in FOI Requests for this data, since it would be public. Crowd source the the mining of the data. A completely transparent society.
Nobody in power would actually be for this (but they expect everyone to be), since it would reveal way more than their claims of what they are searching for/using it for. If we, the public, are expected to trust these agencies and those in power with our data, then we should be able to trust each other. Unfortunately, we'd still here rhetoric about how some people, often those in power, are more trustworthy than others.
Really, the same response works for "I have nothing to hide". If the goals of the surveillance are so morally and ethically pure, and the public can be trusted not to abuse the data, then there revealing all the data to the public would confirm the pure motives and actions.
I wonder what is the purpose of all those comics included each few paragraphs for all the text extension... To make the people distracted and thinking in happy talking animals whereas his lives are scanned?
Maybe instead of revoking every global citizen's right to any type of privacy, the government should address the issue behind the terrorism: namely, radical Islam being allowed to proliferate freely and metastasize.
The US government wants their allies the Saudis to keep funding and producing radicals so that it has an excuse to continue with its global surveillance plan.
As a practical matter privacy from ones own government should be a higher priority than from a foreign government who has less direct control over you.
From Sen. Patrick Leahy, after reading the full classified list:
“We've heard over and over again the assertion that 54 terrorist plots were thwarted” by the two programs, Leahy told Alexander at the Judiciary Committee hearing this month. “That's plainly wrong, but we still get it in letters to members of Congress, we get it in statements. These weren't all plots and they weren't all thwarted. The American people are getting left with the inaccurate impression of the effectiveness of NSA programs.” (http://www.propublica.org/article/claim-on-attacks-thwarted-...)