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Cry me a river. The widespread adoption of encryption wouldn't have been such a pressing issue if spy agencies like the NSA hadn't been abusing their powers by

Cry me a river. The widespread adoption of encryption wouldn't have been such a pressing issue if spy agencies like the NSA hadn't been abusing their powers by conducting mass surveillance on law abiding citizens.

irishcoffee 11y ago
You do realize that all government agencies, especially those under the DoD, serve at the pleasure of the POTUS, right? Obama has had close to two full terms to tell NSA what he wants done and how he wants it done. He could shut the whole joint down tomorrow. He has not. He is very aware of exactly how NSA operates, and he has not changed a damn thing. Blame NSA, or whoever, all you want. They serve at the pleasure of their customer.
- alyandon 11y ago
  This type of wholesale spying on law abiding citizens goes back 15+ years. I blame Obama, Bush, Congress, et al for not showing a backbone and ending these programs. Edit: I'm in an exceedingly grumpy mood today. :-/
  - late2part 11y ago
    Grumpy moods seem to be going around :-) I want to revisit the earlier point in your context. You say that it goes back 15 years. You are right. Each of these parties is jointly and severally liable for it. Obama is currently liable. I think it's just and right to criticize him for failure to act. His lack of fortitude is not excused by the lack of fortitude of others.
  - cheald 11y ago
    15? It's arguable that the government's institutional abuse of power to spy on law-abiding citizens began in earnest with J. Edgar Hoover, who began his tenure as the head of the FBI in 1924.
- Retric 11y ago
  The president can't arbitrarily shut things down or have much direct control. Congress both controls the purse strings and requires money to be spent. At best, POTUS can generally enforce the law, but NSA actually has authority to do mass surveillance from Bush era laws. That said, Obama is clearly in favor of surveillance.
  - mattmanser 11y ago
    You do have to wonder what exaggerated lies they're told to believe that such surveillance is even necessary. I say lies, because if there were any real threats so many more terrorist attacks would happen than actually do. The other theory I've seen is that people in power are used to having their life scrutinized publicly, so personally don't really care about privacy, so are the worst people to making decisions about such things.
    - Retric 11y ago
      I think it's more of an incentive problem, after a disaster like say Hurricane Katrina it's really hard to stand up and publicly say everything is working just fine. Ideally, you want to be able to say well "where it not for the other guy we would have implemented my solution!" Which creates huge pressure based on how bad things look vs. how they actually are.
  - rhino369 11y ago
    The President can't change the laws or the budget. But an order like: "stop warrentless spying," is exactly the sort of order the President can give. Just like he ordered the military to let homosexuals join. Unless the Bush era laws says the NSA MUST spy (and they don't), he is pretty much clear to order them not to spy.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- feld 11y ago
  Why do you people keep repeating these blatant lies? The POTUS does not have direct power to do these kinds of things. It's the whole lot of politicians that are ignorant and corrupt.
  - fein 11y ago
    This has been an odd dynamic through my entire lifetime. The president has never been the one pulling the strings, and I'm not sure why everyone blindly blames the person in that position. There are people whose names the general public has never seen that have a great amount of influence in our legislative process.
    - danso 11y ago
      I dunno, the whole concept of a "commander-in-chief" -- Chief Executive of a country, "The Buck Stops Here" -- is an odd dynamic. While we have the 3 branches of government, one of them is physically and institutionally commandeered by one human being, subject to the limitations and weaknesses shared by the 300 million human beings he oversees. The checks and balances system is nice, preventing a situation in which a depressed or cranky president launches a war "just because"...But there are a lot of other less direct ways that his personal state of being could drastically affect the entire country. What if the senator who is a leading advocate for surveillance reform personally insulted the president's family? Sure, the senator's a jerk, and the president would never admit to basing his decision to ignore the senator on such a personal slight. But if such personal hostility resulted in the president putting the senator much lower on his priority list...such that he never gets around to giving the issue the proper amount of attention...The impact on the country is virtually the same as if the president's reaction had been, "Fk that d-bag and everything he stands for" This is just a long way of saying, yeah, kind of crazy how so much of what affects us as a society is in the hands of one human being, and it's unfair to blame him for not being able to control everything. And yet, he is the one who signed up to have those powers...criticizing him is not just a reflexive tendency to scapegoat, but the current "user-friendly interface" we have with our bureaucracy.
    - 1024core 11y ago
      When Bush was in charge, everyone was quick to blame him. But now that Obama is in charge, suddenly it is "president has never been the one pulling strings .. why is everyone blaming him?"
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > You do realize that all government agencies, especially those under the DoD, serve at the pleasure of the POTUS, right? This is false. Government agencies largely are creations of statute law, and their existence is governed by Congress. The heads of agencies (and top-ranking subordinate officers to a certain level) often serve at the pleasure of the President, but the agencies themselves do not exist at his pleasure. In most cases where the agencies that are not created by statute are subordinate to those that are, those subordinate agencies still do not exist at the discretion of the President, they exist under the statutory authority of some officer of the statutorily-created agency to which they report. (That officer may serve at the pleasure of the President, so the President could fire them for not acting as he wishes with respect to the subordinate agency, but the agency itself does not exist at the discretion of the President.) There are exceptions -- subordinate organizations not created by statute within the Executive Office of the President, for instance -- but generally federal government agencies do not exist at the discretion of the President. Heck, even doing this through a back-door approach by refusing to spend Congressionally-appropriated funds in order to kill a program has been ruled unconstitutional; Train v. City of New York, 420 U.S. 35 (1975).
  - abecedarius 11y ago
    There are exceptions -- subordinate organizations not created by statute within the Executive Office of the President, for instance I don't know what the legal status is now, but the NSA's origin sounds kind of like that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency#World_War_II_and_its_aftermath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency#World... "The agency was formally established by Truman in a memorandum of October 24, 1952, that revised National Security Council Intelligence Directive (NSCID) 9.[28] Since President Truman's memo was a classified document,[28] the existence of the NSA was not known to the public at that time." Here is that memo, according to the NSA: https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/truman/truman_memo.pdf https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/truman/truman_memo.pd... It seems odd to me in talking about the "Director of the NSA" instead of the agency itself, but what do I know.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
- knowaveragejoe 11y ago
  Setting aside the fact that the POTUS can't actually do that, when you think about the fact that information is what makes governing possible in the first place, it makes complete sense that they would explore this sort of thing. Given an vague(and ultimately impossible) mission of "stopping all terrorist attacks", it makes sense that the NSA would be exploring what they have been, and that TPTB would be wholly supportive of it.
- jellicle 11y ago
  It's probably not correct that Obama could close down the entire NSA tomorrow. However, he has essentially complete control over what it does. If he wanted to direct it to do, for example, only military intelligence activities directed solely at warfighting intelligence, he could. This Executive Order: http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/executive-order/12333.html http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/execut... can be changed at any time and to whatever the President desires it to be. He could change it this afternoon if he liked.
- tootie 11y ago
  State and local police and prosecutors don't work for the federal government at all. Any avenue for mass surveillance is also an avenue for legitimate law enforcement investigation.
gress 11y ago
Yes it would. Cybercriminals are even more of a threat than spy agencies to most individuals. [edit: in case it is unclear, I am saying that cybercrime is as strong reason for individuals to use ubiquitous encryption as government snooping not that it is a justification for government snooping]
- late2part 11y ago
  Really? You think cybercriminals do more damage than unbridled governments?
  - jayess 11y ago
    Yes. Cyber criminals put people in internment camps for thought crimes all the time.
    - GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
      Bitlocker is not an 'internment camp.'
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    Direct perceivable damage? Is there even a question? Did the NSA over stepped it's bounds sure, but did anyone actually got directly hurt? Well not really. The NSA is only as "bad" as the rest of the government, it's not a rogue agency that whisks people in the middle of the night to re-education camps, if the US ever becomes such state then encryption isn't going to help you. This isn't an argument against encryption, or in favor of the NSA violating the privacy of US citizens (I am not a US citizen and I do not expect the NSA to care for my privacy) it's just an argument that people should put things in perspective. East Germany didn't became a police state because of the Stasi, they've created the Stasi to enforce it. The US wasn't turned into a police state because of McCarthy-nism, it wouldn't turn into one because of the NSA even if they continue to violate the rights of US citizens unless there will be a major major political shift across all branches of the US government and it's population.

irishcoffee 11y ago

You do realize that all government agencies, especially those under the DoD, serve at the pleasure of the POTUS, right? Obama has had close to two full terms to tell NSA what he wants done and how he wants it done. He could shut the whole joint down tomorrow. He has not. He is very aware of exactly how NSA operates, and he has not changed a damn thing. Blame NSA, or whoever, all you want. They serve at the pleasure of their customer.

alyandon 11y ago
This type of wholesale spying on law abiding citizens goes back 15+ years. I blame Obama, Bush, Congress, et al for not showing a backbone and ending these programs. Edit: I'm in an exceedingly grumpy mood today. :-/
- late2part 11y ago
  Grumpy moods seem to be going around :-) I want to revisit the earlier point in your context. You say that it goes back 15 years. You are right. Each of these parties is jointly and severally liable for it. Obama is currently liable. I think it's just and right to criticize him for failure to act. His lack of fortitude is not excused by the lack of fortitude of others.
- cheald 11y ago
  15? It's arguable that the government's institutional abuse of power to spy on law-abiding citizens began in earnest with J. Edgar Hoover, who began his tenure as the head of the FBI in 1924.
Retric 11y ago
The president can't arbitrarily shut things down or have much direct control. Congress both controls the purse strings and requires money to be spent. At best, POTUS can generally enforce the law, but NSA actually has authority to do mass surveillance from Bush era laws. That said, Obama is clearly in favor of surveillance.
- mattmanser 11y ago
  You do have to wonder what exaggerated lies they're told to believe that such surveillance is even necessary. I say lies, because if there were any real threats so many more terrorist attacks would happen than actually do. The other theory I've seen is that people in power are used to having their life scrutinized publicly, so personally don't really care about privacy, so are the worst people to making decisions about such things.
  - Retric 11y ago
    I think it's more of an incentive problem, after a disaster like say Hurricane Katrina it's really hard to stand up and publicly say everything is working just fine. Ideally, you want to be able to say well "where it not for the other guy we would have implemented my solution!" Which creates huge pressure based on how bad things look vs. how they actually are.
- rhino369 11y ago
  The President can't change the laws or the budget. But an order like: "stop warrentless spying," is exactly the sort of order the President can give. Just like he ordered the military to let homosexuals join. Unless the Bush era laws says the NSA MUST spy (and they don't), he is pretty much clear to order them not to spy.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
feld 11y ago
Why do you people keep repeating these blatant lies? The POTUS does not have direct power to do these kinds of things. It's the whole lot of politicians that are ignorant and corrupt.
- fein 11y ago
  This has been an odd dynamic through my entire lifetime. The president has never been the one pulling the strings, and I'm not sure why everyone blindly blames the person in that position. There are people whose names the general public has never seen that have a great amount of influence in our legislative process.
  - danso 11y ago
    I dunno, the whole concept of a "commander-in-chief" -- Chief Executive of a country, "The Buck Stops Here" -- is an odd dynamic. While we have the 3 branches of government, one of them is physically and institutionally commandeered by one human being, subject to the limitations and weaknesses shared by the 300 million human beings he oversees. The checks and balances system is nice, preventing a situation in which a depressed or cranky president launches a war "just because"...But there are a lot of other less direct ways that his personal state of being could drastically affect the entire country. What if the senator who is a leading advocate for surveillance reform personally insulted the president's family? Sure, the senator's a jerk, and the president would never admit to basing his decision to ignore the senator on such a personal slight. But if such personal hostility resulted in the president putting the senator much lower on his priority list...such that he never gets around to giving the issue the proper amount of attention...The impact on the country is virtually the same as if the president's reaction had been, "Fk that d-bag and everything he stands for" This is just a long way of saying, yeah, kind of crazy how so much of what affects us as a society is in the hands of one human being, and it's unfair to blame him for not being able to control everything. And yet, he is the one who signed up to have those powers...criticizing him is not just a reflexive tendency to scapegoat, but the current "user-friendly interface" we have with our bureaucracy.
  - 1024core 11y ago
    When Bush was in charge, everyone was quick to blame him. But now that Obama is in charge, suddenly it is "president has never been the one pulling strings .. why is everyone blaming him?"
dragonwriter 11y ago
> You do realize that all government agencies, especially those under the DoD, serve at the pleasure of the POTUS, right? This is false. Government agencies largely are creations of statute law, and their existence is governed by Congress. The heads of agencies (and top-ranking subordinate officers to a certain level) often serve at the pleasure of the President, but the agencies themselves do not exist at his pleasure. In most cases where the agencies that are not created by statute are subordinate to those that are, those subordinate agencies still do not exist at the discretion of the President, they exist under the statutory authority of some officer of the statutorily-created agency to which they report. (That officer may serve at the pleasure of the President, so the President could fire them for not acting as he wishes with respect to the subordinate agency, but the agency itself does not exist at the discretion of the President.) There are exceptions -- subordinate organizations not created by statute within the Executive Office of the President, for instance -- but generally federal government agencies do not exist at the discretion of the President. Heck, even doing this through a back-door approach by refusing to spend Congressionally-appropriated funds in order to kill a program has been ruled unconstitutional; Train v. City of New York, 420 U.S. 35 (1975).
- abecedarius 11y ago
  There are exceptions -- subordinate organizations not created by statute within the Executive Office of the President, for instance I don't know what the legal status is now, but the NSA's origin sounds kind of like that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency#World_War_II_and_its_aftermath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency#World... "The agency was formally established by Truman in a memorandum of October 24, 1952, that revised National Security Council Intelligence Directive (NSCID) 9.[28] Since President Truman's memo was a classified document,[28] the existence of the NSA was not known to the public at that time." Here is that memo, according to the NSA: https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/truman/truman_memo.pdf https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/truman/truman_memo.pd... It seems odd to me in talking about the "Director of the NSA" instead of the agency itself, but what do I know.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
knowaveragejoe 11y ago
Setting aside the fact that the POTUS can't actually do that, when you think about the fact that information is what makes governing possible in the first place, it makes complete sense that they would explore this sort of thing. Given an vague(and ultimately impossible) mission of "stopping all terrorist attacks", it makes sense that the NSA would be exploring what they have been, and that TPTB would be wholly supportive of it.
jellicle 11y ago
It's probably not correct that Obama could close down the entire NSA tomorrow. However, he has essentially complete control over what it does. If he wanted to direct it to do, for example, only military intelligence activities directed solely at warfighting intelligence, he could. This Executive Order: http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/executive-order/12333.html http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/execut... can be changed at any time and to whatever the President desires it to be. He could change it this afternoon if he liked.
tootie 11y ago
State and local police and prosecutors don't work for the federal government at all. Any avenue for mass surveillance is also an avenue for legitimate law enforcement investigation.

gress 11y ago

Yes it would. Cybercriminals are even more of a threat than spy agencies to most individuals. [edit: in case it is unclear, I am saying that cybercrime is as strong reason for individuals to use ubiquitous encryption as government snooping not that it is a justification for government snooping]

late2part 11y ago
Really? You think cybercriminals do more damage than unbridled governments?
- jayess 11y ago
  Yes. Cyber criminals put people in internment camps for thought crimes all the time.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
    Bitlocker is not an 'internment camp.'
- dogma1138 11y ago
  Direct perceivable damage? Is there even a question? Did the NSA over stepped it's bounds sure, but did anyone actually got directly hurt? Well not really. The NSA is only as "bad" as the rest of the government, it's not a rogue agency that whisks people in the middle of the night to re-education camps, if the US ever becomes such state then encryption isn't going to help you. This isn't an argument against encryption, or in favor of the NSA violating the privacy of US citizens (I am not a US citizen and I do not expect the NSA to care for my privacy) it's just an argument that people should put things in perspective. East Germany didn't became a police state because of the Stasi, they've created the Stasi to enforce it. The US wasn't turned into a police state because of McCarthy-nism, it wouldn't turn into one because of the NSA even if they continue to violate the rights of US citizens unless there will be a major major political shift across all branches of the US government and it's population.