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I wonder if this has the potential to influence mass surveillance or will just accelerate evaporative cooling of the internal dynamics of the agencies. Cults be

I wonder if this has the potential to influence mass surveillance or will just accelerate evaporative cooling of the internal dynamics of the agencies. Cults become more extreme when their moderate members leave....

aembleton 11y ago
Agreed. We should have a campaign to get more rational people to join the intelligence agencies.
- happyscrappy 11y ago
  Don't know why you are being downvoted. Spy agencies going away is a fantasy that brings into question the sanity of the believer. Better to have moral people there.
  - bcoates 11y ago
    They don't need to go away, they can just be neutered. There were two massive cutbacks in spy agencies in the last 50 years, having a third is not a fantasy. "I can make this organization by and for evil people marginally better by joining it and being less evil" isn't exactly a new idea either but hasn't aged well.
    - happyscrappy 11y ago
      The general mindset of comments on articles like these is they should not be spying on anyone and I said go away not a mere cutback.
- pdkl95 11y ago
  As Drake explains in the linked video, just asking questions about what was going on - nevermind actual accusations - was enough to be excluded. We see similar behavior in police departments, where people have tried to join to add to the number of "good cops". Unfortunately, when this type of groupthink becomes so entrenched, anything resembling a contradictory idea has to be crushed, removed, or ignored immediately. It is a basic fight-or-flight response, because nobody wants to admit they've been doing the wrong thing for years. The solution is similar, and ideas like intelexit will help. Instead of wasting energy trying to push against groupthink, help people leave where they can form so they can form a different origination. For example, it would be nice if we had an actual agency focused on defense and the hard problem of securing computers that had even a tiny fraction of the NSA's budget.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
cryoshon 11y ago
That's true, but the more moderates that leave, the more chances we have at a Snowden 2.0 who is going to throw the family jewels to the internet on his way out the door. Snowden is still an outlier in people's minds-- they don't know about Binney or Drake. More people from the inside joining these voices would really help.
- tptacek 11y ago
  To be fair, it doesn't seem like many HN people know much about Binney and Drake either. Both supported another elaborate system of dragnet surveillance ("ThinThread"), which apparently attempted to use cryptography to mitigate privacy concerns. Both left the agency after ThinThread was jettisoned in favor of "Trailblazer", which had the virtue of being a darling of government contractors. I doubt many of us would have been happy with a full-scale deployment of ThinThread either.
  - jonlucc 11y ago
    According to them, ThinThread had the added benefit of completely disregarding domestic communications. Only after the agency gutted the protections did Binney and Drake come out.
    - tptacek 11y ago
      That is not how I understand ThinThread. Rather, ThinThread does bulk collection, and then applies "crypto" to the problem of keeping the wrong people from seeing domestic communications. The premise of ThinThread is, like other NSA programs, that NSA gets carte blanche access to the AT&T and Verizon firehose.

aembleton 11y ago

Agreed. We should have a campaign to get more rational people to join the intelligence agencies.

happyscrappy 11y ago
Don't know why you are being downvoted. Spy agencies going away is a fantasy that brings into question the sanity of the believer. Better to have moral people there.
- bcoates 11y ago
  They don't need to go away, they can just be neutered. There were two massive cutbacks in spy agencies in the last 50 years, having a third is not a fantasy. "I can make this organization by and for evil people marginally better by joining it and being less evil" isn't exactly a new idea either but hasn't aged well.
  - happyscrappy 11y ago
    The general mindset of comments on articles like these is they should not be spying on anyone and I said go away not a mere cutback.
pdkl95 11y ago
As Drake explains in the linked video, just asking questions about what was going on - nevermind actual accusations - was enough to be excluded. We see similar behavior in police departments, where people have tried to join to add to the number of "good cops". Unfortunately, when this type of groupthink becomes so entrenched, anything resembling a contradictory idea has to be crushed, removed, or ignored immediately. It is a basic fight-or-flight response, because nobody wants to admit they've been doing the wrong thing for years. The solution is similar, and ideas like intelexit will help. Instead of wasting energy trying to push against groupthink, help people leave where they can form so they can form a different origination. For example, it would be nice if we had an actual agency focused on defense and the hard problem of securing computers that had even a tiny fraction of the NSA's budget.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

cryoshon 11y ago

That's true, but the more moderates that leave, the more chances we have at a Snowden 2.0 who is going to throw the family jewels to the internet on his way out the door. Snowden is still an outlier in people's minds-- they don't know about Binney or Drake. More people from the inside joining these voices would really help.

tptacek 11y ago
To be fair, it doesn't seem like many HN people know much about Binney and Drake either. Both supported another elaborate system of dragnet surveillance ("ThinThread"), which apparently attempted to use cryptography to mitigate privacy concerns. Both left the agency after ThinThread was jettisoned in favor of "Trailblazer", which had the virtue of being a darling of government contractors. I doubt many of us would have been happy with a full-scale deployment of ThinThread either.
- jonlucc 11y ago
  According to them, ThinThread had the added benefit of completely disregarding domestic communications. Only after the agency gutted the protections did Binney and Drake come out.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    That is not how I understand ThinThread. Rather, ThinThread does bulk collection, and then applies "crypto" to the problem of keeping the wrong people from seeing domestic communications. The premise of ThinThread is, like other NSA programs, that NSA gets carte blanche access to the AT&T and Verizon firehose.