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What large terror attacks have hit the USA since mass surveillance began?
by rhino369 11y ago
What 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.
- lern_too_spel 11y agoThe selectors apply to data already collected from the few people the FBI has under surveillance. There is simply no "mass" about it.
- rtl49 11y agoA third possibility is that such queries are detected, but maintaining secrecy is judged to be a higher priority than preventing a comparatively smaller number of deaths while revealing their capabilities.
- lukeschlather 11y agoPRISM isn't supposed to be used against US citizens in that manner. They've admitted that PRISM can be used in that manner, but that's never been a goal of the program and theoretically what little oversight there is is supposed to prevent that.
- rtl49 11y agoNo, this phenomenon is only related to the topic of terrorism in that it also receives an excessive amount of attention and irrational fear.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- antsar 11y agoDidn't mass surveillance exist, in one form or another, prior to 9/11?
- rhino369 11y agoThat probably depends on what you define as mass surveillance. But even today 99.9% of Americans aren't really surveilled in the conventional sense. FISA courts only issue ~3,000 wiretapping, data download requests a year.
- jakeogh 11y agoSome are general warrants so the number becomes meaningless.
- lallysingh 11y agoBut in the actual sense, data on american's communications is captured* for the vast majority of americans. * People like to play games with definitions. Captured: Data goes into a device owned and operated by an american intelligence agency.
- rhino369 11y agoI think the biggest actual capture is buffering. I suspect the NSA is buffering almost all communication in the USA (or maybe just international cable communications, but I'd bet all). But it's not actively used or analyzed unless something comes up. And after a few days it's deleted. If you end up shooting up a Eagles of Death Metal show in Paris, they can rewind your recent communications. Whether that is mass surveillance is pretty questionable IMO. It's a sort of a "if a tree falls in the wood and nobody hears, does it make a sound" territory. It's really no different than the Post Office having your mail. They could rip it open, but their mere possession isn't surveillance. I think where you have a better argument is the meta data mass collection. They physically got that information. It's on their servers forever. And here is where the surveillance part comes in--they actually run analysis on it. They claim they only stay within "two hops" of known suspects, but that's probably BS and you get into a "6 degree of Keven Bacon" situation where two hops probably gets nearly everyone. So I think that meta data program is the only program I've heard about from the Snowden leaks that is actually a mass surveillance of the American people. But there is a counter argument. It's mass surveillance of information that isn't actually private, thus, it's not a intrusion of your privacy. They are only looking at data that your telephone company has on you. In fact, baring any sort of data privacy law, that information is Verizon's and they can do what they want with it. Including hand it over to the government. And in practice, American companies keep that sort of meta data and use it for commercial purposes all the time. Hell, google doesn't even have to triangulate towers, they just use the GPS the customer paid for to track them to within 10 feet.
- rtl49 11y agoThe efficacy of mass surveillance cannot be inferred from a lack of large terror attacks.
- oh_sigh 11y agoAnd the inefficacy of mass surveillance cannot be inferred from the NSA refusing to talk about what they are doing.
- rtl49 11y agoI meant to capture your sentiment in my reply. I was using "efficacy" in its absolute sense, the synonym of "effectiveness" or "worth," which I take to be its primary definition.
- stavrianos 11y agoCompare to: what large tigers have attacked me since mass surveillance began?
- strictnein 11y agoThere's a mass surveillance program intended to stop tigers from attacking you?
- stavrianos 11y agoSystems designed to prevent black swan events need to be evaluated against a higher standard than "there haven't been any since we started". That's not success, it's exactly what we would have expected anyways.
- strictnein 11y agoWe would have expected no large scale terrorist attacks in the US from 2001 until now? Absolutely no one expected that. Is it a black swan event if it was attempted 8 years earlier (WTC 1993, 6 dead, 1000 injured)?
- nitrogen 11y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm2W0sq9ddU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm2W0sq9ddU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Much_Apu_About_Nothing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Much_Apu_About_Nothing
- rhino369 11y agoI will fully admit that not having one happen is not good (or even so-so) evidence that it works. However, this article does the reverse. And claim that it is useless because it hasn't prevented something that never happened in the first place. My seat-belt never saved my life but I put it on anyway. 0 for 0 isn't good information in either direction.
- rmxt 11y ago