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U.S. Mass Surveillance Has No Record of Thwarting Large Terror Attacks
- hatsunearu 11y agoCan anything twart "Large Terror Attacks"? Is there really a socioeconomical measure that can twart a determined attacker?
- bigdubs 11y agoA phrase, "Show me a 10ft tall fence and I'll show you an 11ft tall ladder." comes to mind. There will always be a cat and mouse game, it seems the trick is to not play the game in the first place.
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoNo, the trick is to play the game, not perfectly, but well enough that the other side decides not to play. If you don't play and they do...
- bigdubs 11y agoWhy give them a reason to play? "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth makes us all blind and toothless." also then comes to mind.
- vectorjohn 11y agoI don't know the right answer as to how to defend against terrorism, etc. But this argument makes no sense. "They" (whoever they are) don't need a reason to play, they already have one. Choosing "not to play" is just allowing whoever they are to do whatever they want.
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoCurrently they think they have a reason to play. If we stop playing, they aren't going to for some length of time, perhaps measured in generations. Given that "playing" means "attacking us trying to kill as many people as possible", I do not want to be in the situation where they are playing offense and we aren't playing defense.
- merpnderp 11y agoIf the West stops playing, it's not like Turkey, China, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia will stop too. And there's no reason to believe the war would become less bloody with even more refugees.
- ihsw 11y agoPlaying cat and mouse is different from ladder and wall. To breach a wall, you have to construct a single ladder. To protect against a ladder, you have to raise all of your walls. This escalation is in fact the basis of al Qaeda's anti-Western military strategy -- to engage in assymmetric warfare[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare
- efuquen 11y agoIf that's so then why has there not been aa "Large Terror Attack" in the US since 9/11? Pulling off another such successful attack has been a stated major goal of Al Queda and not ISIS. Clearly something is preventing it and making it more difficult then doing it in Europe, which have suffered several attacks, with what happened in Paris being the most severe.
- onewaystreet 11y agoHalf of the reason has been the incompetence of the terrorists. There have been a number of failed attacks in the US in the last few years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsuccessful_terrorist_plots_in_the_United_States_post-9/11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsuccessful_terrorist...
- astrodust 11y agoTerrorists are by and large muppets, they operate on inadequate budgets, they plan badly, they execute inconsistently. The only reason they succeed is becomes on infrequent occasions law enforcement is even more incompetent. The 9/11 attacks had many, many red flag warnings before they went down that were largely ignored. What's so unusual about people training to fly planes, but not take off or land, right? The same patterns will be found here in hindsight. Deep, pervasive surveillance will only flood already saturated information channels. What they need is less information of a higher quality, not more noise in the system.
- Consultant32452 11y agoIt's important to recognize that they also wanted to attack the US for at least a decade PRIOR to 9/11. So what was preventing them from doing it then?
- rhino369 11y agoWhat large terror attacks have hit the USA since mass surveillance began?
- knieveltech 11y agoI guess the near-daily occurrences of mass shootings don't technically count...
- rhino369 11y agoIf the NSA was tasked with it maybe I'd count it. But the NSA isn't supposed to be preventing crime in the USA. Plus most mass shootings are lone gunman. You are never going to prevent that with communication spying.
- rmxt 11y agoCommunication spying of the PRISM variety [1] is exactly the kind of thing that should aid in the prevention of lone wolf style attacks. You're telling me that a modern lone wolf never uses a web search to find out "how to [buy an automatic rifle/how to rent a car anonymously/insert heinous act here]"? If the surveillance is gathering up these searches and still has no record of stopping attacks, then two options, amongst others, are: get better filtering and analysis techniques, or my preferred option, disband the (illegal) programs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#Extent_of_the_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#E...
- lern_too_spel 11y agoPRISM isn't a mass surveillance program.
- rmxt 11y agoJust because it requires "selectors" before it can provide output, doesn't mean that it's not taking bulk communication as input. How can something that requires "minimization procedures" be anything besides mass surveillance? If I'm missing what you are disputing about the "mass" part of PRISM, please explain further.
- msbarnett 11y agoAnd, reminder, France authorized a sweeping mass surveillance bill back in May. It, too, doesn't seem to have stopped anything.
- jessaustin 11y agoThat just proves it should have been more sweeping. (and more expensive!)
- api 11y agoYour last quip seems minor but I personally think it's a huge driver for all this. "Security" is a huge pork barrel for a large number of contractors and equipment vendors. A lot of it is basically snake oil but that doesn't matter. Getting money out of the government piñata is the goal, not actual security.
- strictnein 11y agoIf a government passes something, it doesn't just magically become fully operational, regardless of what type of program it is. It takes a little more than a couple months.
- msbarnett 11y agoThe legislation was largely to authorize practices that the surveillance community was already engaged in but which were on questionable legal ground because the existing legal framework had not been updated since 1991. They also expanded the ability of the French surveillance community to outsource some of their needs to 3rd parties; eg, require ISPs to store communications rather than the Government intercepting them and storing them. France was absolutely not starting from scratch on Surveillance at the beginning of May. The bill dropped the need for things like "get a warrant before monitoring all traffic to/from an IP in realtime"; they had that ability long before. Edit: I would absolutely love someone to explain why this post is being downvoted
- heroh 11y agoyou know what's a coincidence though: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-17/hours-before-the-terror-attacks-paris-practiced-for-a-mass-shooting http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-17/hours-befo... drills as mass attacks are happening - be it 9/11 , Sandy Hook, London Bombing or others + factor in: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/17/serbian-police-arrest-man-with-syrian-passport-matching-paris-attackers http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/17/serbian-police-... The passport of a "suicide bomber" escaped the bomb blast and landed into the hands of autorities (conviniently) -- but now Serbian police have proven it to be a fraudulent passport...so how did it get there?
- wimagguc 11y ago"the reason there haven’t been any large-scale terror attacks by ISIS in the U.S. is not because they were averted by the intelligence community, but because — with the possible exception of one that was foiled by local police — none were actually planned." So what would happen if more attacks were planned? (Brilliant habit, reading HN right before going to bed.)
- unabridged 11y agoNot to defend mass surveillance, but why would there be any public record of this? Wouldn't you expect most major thwarted attacks to be kept classified?
- chiph 11y agoIf they had, they would be very tempted to publicize it as that would get them a bigger budget next year.
- strictnein 11y agoRevealing what they stopped would also possibly reveal the methods used to stop it. And they're not exactly hurting in the budget department.
- forgottenpass 11y agoThe Executive branch has a habit of classified information getting "leaked" if it makes them look good and is about a program that is already an open-secret anyway.
- rtkwe 11y agoYou'd expect the exact methods they used to detect and catch the planners to be kept secret or only vaguely talked about. They could crow heavily about any substantial plots stopped though and trot out evidence found after the cell/whatever was rounded up without really exposing how they found the cell.
- hatsunearu 11y ago"We the NSA have prevented N terrorist attacks last month thanks to our surveillance program." Pretty compelling argument for them to be not making, IMHO.
- strictnein 11y agoThey would then reveal to the planners of the attempted attack that it was the NSA that discovered it, not the CIA or FBI, etc. And hardly anyone here would believe them anyways, because the goal posts would just be moved to "Why doesn't the NSA show us proof of the plots they stopped instead of just telling us how many they stopped?".
- hockeybias 11y agoHow would you know that with any certainty?
- forgotpwtomain 11y agoI think it's very clear to everyone not tuning into to the mass-media narrative that the true goal of all the governments and agencies involved is not "preventing the next terror threat" but a power-play for the control of information. Not only is there no pertinent evidence to demonstrate that surveillance has ever paid off; There is much more so, extremely pertinent evidence that demonstrates the past 30 years of foreign policy have directly contributed to past and current day terrorist threats: Financing the Taliban and Bin-laden to fight the soviets in the 80's, invading and destabilizing Iraq, financing Syrian rebels (in part ISIS supporters and/or sympthathizers) while destabilizing Syria, etc, etc..- Yet somehow none of this is part of the main-stream narrative and a couple months later Obama will be asking congress for more funds to fight Assad and the NSA will be asking for broader surveillance powers. I'm very sorry for the people that have lost their family members and loved ones in the course of these things but the answer is not and cannot be "more drone strikes" and "everyone forfeit your privacy".
- ihsw 11y agoIndeed, the elephant in the room is Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Both have a significant interest in the removal of the Ba'athist government from Syria, and they have both expended significant resources in achieving this goal (officially or otherwise). Resources which Isil has benefited from handsomely, and in fact the only reason Turkey and the KSA are currently engaging Isil directly is because of the domestic threat posed by homegrown Isil cells. While the West is equally guilty of this abject laziness and callousness, Turkey and the KSA have contributed far more to the global jihadi movement than any other organization since Isil announced independence in June 2014.
- forgotpwtomain 11y agoFrom my understanding Turkey had a basically "hear no evil, see no evil" policy for anti-Assad rebels and arms-shipments across their border and the US encouraged this(!). As for Saudi Arabia, their government is just about as bad as Assad on human rights - which of course doesn't prevent the US and US politicians from being very cozy with them as long as it serves their geo-political agenda.
- fredgrott 11y agoWhat the article left out.. Guess what the limiting factor of effective surveillance of Islamic terrorists is? And I state that the CIA and NSA have known this since the early 1970s... Ready? Its the amount of trained foreign language people that the CIA, NSA, and FBI have that happen to be skilled in largely Arabic based languages. Now for the wrinkle how do we get those numbers increased? Guess? The exact opposite of what republican law makers want to do that is have a fully functioning immigration system. NSA could tomorrow sweep all communication world-wide but without concrete steps to increase foreign language people to translate any of it is such a HUGE BONDOGGLE that defies description..
- dmix 11y agoThat is part of a far bigger problem than just requiring a large bilingual workforce: http://as2914.net/ http://as2914.net/ (map of BGP networks) ^ comparing this to finding needles in haystacks is a a severe understatement. The scale of internet is mind-boggling. The amount of data flowing through it is massive. Considering most of that which is relevant is wrapped in HTTPS and even the best financed SIGINT agency will have a tough time doing mass surveillance dragnet with any cost-effective results. Add foreign languages into the mix and it's even more expensive.
- oberstein 11y agoFlooding the country with Arab speaking immigrants with the goal that some will filter up to the TLA agencies to help with surveillance on their former countrymen is ludicrous. If you want the numbers of Arabic speakers increased, you teach the language or hire existing talent. In any case, machine translation is pretty good these days -- even if Google doesn't perform that well on Arabic. Encryption is a much bigger barrier than language.
- oh_sigh 11y agoHow can you show this?
- strictnein 11y agoThey can't. They seem to be claiming to have proved a negative.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- junto 11y agoPerfect. Timing. This is the article that should also be on the front on the NYT and Washington Post, the Times and the Independent. Every major newspaper should be fulfilling its fourth estate responsibilities.
- hackuser 11y ago(I'm going to repeat a comment that got buried in another discussion:) The government and businesses have built a state of surveillance far beyond anything dreamt of a couple of decades ago, with massive continuing investment. Yet the tool of surveillance was unable to stop this attack. Now they want more surveillance, but maybe it's the wrong tool for this job. Surveillance seems to have reached that place on the technology adoption curve where people get a little over-enthusiastic and blindly think it solves every problem, and they haven't yet realized it's a tool which, like all tools, is good for for things but not for others. (That ignores the massive cost to individuals and to our societies of surveillance.)
- ori_b 11y agoI don't like surveillance, but at the same time, I wonder: How much of this lack of record can be attributed to parallel construction, where law enforcement uses the surveillance results to "luckily" know where to look, and "by chance" figure out how to foil the terrorists? I can imagine that the intelligence agencies may not be thrilled about broadcasting their capabilities. My nightmare scenario is that surveillance actually is helping, but the extent is a closely guarded secret, which means that we'll never get rid of it, and we'll never know why, or have a chance to, as a society, have a conversation about the tradeoff between surveillance and counterterrorism.
- suprgeek 11y agoThat is because "Preventing terrorist attacks" is used only to SELL the program to the populace. Its real goal is to make it so that the status-quo is not disturbed. These programs will be used and are being used to monitor and arrest domestic radicals, support foreign espionage for American economic interests, etc much more than any terrorist prevention: In order of priority: 1) Target "Occupy wallstreet", G20 protests, Greenpeace etc 2) Target foreign govts & corporations for economic gain 3) Target Radicals in foreign countries that oppose US interests (some of these could very well be terrorists also) 4) Actual terrorists So if we keep using the wrong metric to measure success then obviously "Mass surveillance" has failed. The Director of the CIA wasted no time blaming Snowden for the Paris attacks [1] - dismissing all concerns as "hand-wringing". I am now waiting for the "Our current spying is not enough, we need even more spying powers" congress actions to surface. Cynically exploiting the fear and concern after an attack is the real game here - the "efficacy" of the measures proposed is irrelevant, as no one will be able to hold them accountable. [1] - http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/us/after-paris-attacks-cia-director-rekindles-debate-over-surveillance.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/us/after-paris-attacks-cia...
- heroh 11y agoIn Wake of Paris, FCC Seeks Power to Monitor, Shutter Websites "Citing possible links between terror-related websites and online communications and Friday’s attacks on Paris, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler suggested Tuesday Congress give the agency more authority to use ‘big data’ to monitor and act on potential threats." http://www.insidesources.com/in-wake-of-paris-fcc-seeks-power-to-monitor-shutter-websites/ http://www.insidesources.com/in-wake-of-paris-fcc-seeks-powe... This will be pushed into the narrative & they will have their way.
- arbitrage314 11y agoLike most of you, I think mass surveillance is a fairly big problem. Even so, how do we KNOW that there haven't been any major terrorist attacks thwarted? If I were the government, I would keep my thwarting as secret as possible (up until the point where the public turns against me enough to start trying to shut me down).