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I 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 "preventi

I 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 ago
Indeed, 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 ago
  From 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.
  - ihsw 11y ago
    Honestly, regarding Saudi Arabia, I think their strategy is to buy as much equipment as possible so that the West has no choice but to prop up the House of Saud. Why do they have no choice? Well, if the House of Saud falls then the weapons would reach the hands of jihadist terrorists before you can say "9/11," and the Royal Saudi Army has a very large stockpile of all of the best hardware you can buy with petrodollars.
    - lifeisstillgood 11y ago
      An airforce able to rival the Marines does not "fall into the hands of terrorists". Saudi Arabia wants to be a regional power and wants to back that up with force. Oh and suppress domestic unrest.
  - jqm 11y ago
    "As for Saudi Arabia, their government is just about as bad as Assad on human rights" They are a whole lot worse.
    - dsfyu404ed 11y ago
      It's hard to be worse than mustard gas...
      - jqm 11y ago
        Did Assad actually use mustard gas? Is stockpiling mustard gas better or worse than stockpiling nuclear missiles? Just things to think about. As for human rights... KSA is considerably worse than Assad.
rtl49 11y ago
Possibly so, though if you believe this, presumably the powers that be would not be above fabricating such evidence. Bear in mind that the data used in this article are from arrest records. In fact, many of the arrests supposedly resulting from online activity could just as easily have occurred because of reports by concerned citizens. Would you put it past the authorities to seize a suspected terrorist identified through dragnet surveillance without creating a record of arrest? I think it is not inconceivable. If you are opposed to mass surveillance, I think the best argument is that its social costs surpass the benefit of reducing terrorism. But perhaps this is not such a palatable argument after two well-publicized tragedies.
- brlewis 11y ago
  You speak of "the benefit of reducing terrorism" as if it's a given rather than a hypothetical possibility.
  - rtl49 11y ago
    No I don't. There I grant the opposition their belief as a stipulation for the purpose of making a more salient point: terrorism is not so destructive as people tend to think, and regulating the flow of information is more destructive than people tend to think. Thus we avoid the challenge of quantifying mass surveillance's efficacy in reducing terrorism.
jacobolus 11y ago
30 years is a pretty short time horizon to look at. Western meddling as a driver of chaos and authoritarianism in the Middle East stretches back at least a century or two. If Europeans hadn’t drawn completely arbitrary national borders all over the region after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, if Palestine had been left to its Arab inhabitants instead of displacing them in favor of European Jews, if the British and Americans hadn’t put so much emphasis on securing the Suez Canal via support for friendly dictatorships nearby, if the US hadn’t toppled the Iranian democracy under Mosaddegh in 1953 to reinstall the Shah, if Western European, Russian, and American guns hadn’t been handed out on all sides like candy, etc., the region would certainly be far different from now. But it’s impossible to guess exactly what the effects of some counterfactual foreign policy over the past century would be.
- mc32 11y ago
  Arbitrary borders doesn't explain it all. Africa has just as many arbitrary borders and lots of wars and insurrection happened and continue to happen, but except for north Africa, sub-Saharan Africa doesn't suffer the same kind of chaos and terrorism except for where isil AQ, etc have operatives. So, Africa seems to indicate that terrorism requires a foreign religious aspect in order to take root.
  - api 11y ago
    I'm sure the fact that the Middle East sits on the world's largest deposits of cheap-to-extract high-EROEI and therefore maximally profitable oil has absolutely nothing to do with it. :) The amount of oil in the ground in places like Canada might indeed rival the Middle East, but it's lower-EROEI more expensive oil. The amount of money in the ground is higher in the Middle East than anywhere else. Sub-Saharan Africa does have quite a bit of resource wealth but it doesn't have anywhere near as fat and juicy a prize as the ME does.
    - mc32 11y ago
      So how does that explain Yemen, or the troubles in the Philippines? Are they overflowing with rich resources? Contrast Mindanao with the rest of the PH.
merpnderp 11y ago
Wikileaks shows that the US and allies have been financing and working towards instability in Syria since 2007. Maybe working with Russia to temper Assad would have been a better solution, or perhaps some other avenue. But overthrowing Assad has been an epic disaster and more surveillance isn't the answer.
- dsfyu404ed 11y ago
  "Maybe working with Russia to temper Assad would have been a better solution" I believe the word you're searching for is "banana republic"
  - merpnderp 11y ago
    Japan, S. Korea, and Taiwan were at some point in their current governments, little more than puppet governments of the US. A corrupt puppet of a US+Turkey+Saudi/Russian+Chinese+Iranian coalition that at least offered stability would be far preferable to the murderous chaos that exists now.
arca_vorago 11y ago
"true goal of all the governments and agencies is...a power-play for the control of information." You sir, are very close to the truth. The reality is that it isn't about control of the information per se, but what can be accomplished with said information. In this case, the "information" we are referring to is the massive amount of metadata we generate, not to mention the content thereof, and I would posit that the true goal is the control of the people, through ownership of the information. The distinction is a small but important one. It is about control, not security, and anybody saying otherwise is generally ill-informed or ignorant. From an intelligence side of things, it used to take so much effort to do dirty tricks on people. You had to black bag their place of residence, you had to tail them for days, weeks, sometimes months. These days, you just PRISM/ECHELON your way into their data, pull all the dirt you need out, and approach them with your demands as you will. This is only one of the most palpable dangers of the surveillance age, in that the intel agencies and potential moles/infiltrators can potentially have vast amounts of power over institutions they shouldn't, for example, congress. It's essentially setting us up for a coup d'etat of the oligarchy. (people need to remember that the OSS/CIA came straight out of London/WallStreet! I think people should also be made aware of the often at odds nature of the different intel agencies. I think military intelligence is rightly suspicious of the Company.) I spent a long time trying to understand this machine because I was an action arm of it at one time (and perhaps if called upon, may one day again be), and my conclusions are not hopeful, pretty, and often are considered conspiracy theory. What I have said above only scratches the surface.
- fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
  per se https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases_%28P%29#per_se https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases_%28P%29#...
  - arca_vorago 11y ago
    Thank you for the correction, mental note added and comment edited.
- heroh 11y ago
  >What I have said above only scratches the surface. keep going. be aware the analytical & technically savy are also considered threats to the establishment: "NSA: Linux Journal is an "extremist forum" and its readers get flagged for extra surveillance" http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/nsa-linux-journal-extremist-forum-and-its-readers-get-flagged-extra-surveillance http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/nsa-linux-journal-extrem...
sampo 11y ago
> Financing the Taliban and Bin-laden to fight the soviets in the 80's Can anyone make guesses how Afghanistan would have turned out if the Soviets had been let to freely occupy Afghanistan? Would the country have turned into another North Korea, or perhaps something like Afghanistan's northern neighbors, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, are today? Or would the secular socialistic and religious elements have gone into civil war anyway, even without the US supporting the religious side?
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  Honestly? Afghanistan's a really difficult region to unify politically; it's only happened a handful of times in history. On top of that, the global trend in the last ~100 years has been towards nationalism and away from consolidated, sprawling empires. Due to the geography and ethnic composition of Afghanistan, it's highly unlikely that the Soviets would have been able to do exercise much control over it in the long-run with any semblance of stability[0]. So I'd be very skeptical of the idea that it would have turned into anything resembling North Korea. In all honesty, it would probably look relatively similar to what it does today. In that alternate universe, it wouldn't necessarily be the Taliban itself that came to power, but the group that occupied that role would be similar in ideology and effect to the Taliban that exists in this universe. [0] ignoring the pending collapse of the USSR, of course, but since this is all speculation anyway, we can take some liberties.
  - mahyarm 11y ago
    Would a balkanized afghanistan be politically stable eventually then?
    - chimeracoder 11y ago
      We're talking about a country that's been used essentially as a pawn by the major imperial powers of each era for the last 200+ years. (This situation is not unique to Afghanistan - which is why many other countries have similar problems - but Afghanistan's geography compounds the effect). The British, Russians, US, Ottomans, Mughals, Safavids - all of them have spent significant time and effort (not to mention military power) trying to secure the region for "their" side. All of them struggled with it, to the point where it's debatable whether any of them ever succeeded. This situation continues on today - so no, I don't think Afghanistan can ever be politically stable as long as it continues to hold this role in global geopolitics[0]. Perhaps circumstances will change and we'll start to see a more stable regime emerge there, but it's kind of hard to force that when one of the major causes for instability in the last two centuries has been external influence in the first place. EDIT: Unrelated to the answer, but I find the use of the word 'balkanized' particularly amusing given the etymology (it refers to the fragmentation of parts of the former Ottoman empire into many states that compete with each other for regional influence). Afghanistan is not part of the Balkan peninsula, but it did have its own fascinating power struggle with the Ottoman empire, and the breakup of the Ottoman empire in the early 20th century was a major turning point that influenced the current state of Afghanistan today. [0] I'm not sure any country really could be, for what it's worth, but we're talking about Afghanistan.
happyscrappy 11y ago
>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. This is a laughable statement but typically upvoted on HN. Politicians have to appear to have done everything possible to prevent these attacks. They are not dictators, if the public feels they were soft on terror they are gone, no pentaverate necessary.
- indrax 11y ago
  >appear >public feels You did not make a counterargument.
exelius 11y ago
So I am of two minds with regards to foreign intervention by the US. On one hand, I'm horrified at the things the US does. We kill innocents, we send our own citizens to die for really very little reason, and we spend an epic fuck ton of money with very little to show in terms of tactical results. We stick our nose in situations that don't involve us just because we can, and I'm tired of the US always being the world's police force. On the other hand, global power politics aren't about playing nice. As far as hegemonist world powers throughout history go, the US is relatively benevolent (wiretaps and extrajudicial renditions are nothing compared to the genocides perpetrated by nearly every preceding global power). In the absence of a dominant global power, you would have multiple equally-matched regional powers vying for supremacy -- a situation that would almost certainly end in war and the emergence of a new, potentially less benevolent global power. A lot of innocent people likely die in this scenario too. The world is undoubtedly a safer place because the US does horrible things to bad people (and yes, at times to good people too). The fact that there is a single superpower that can and will defeat anyone, anywhere deters a lot of large-scale bad behavior -- the last 70 years since WWII have been some of the most peaceful in human history. Casualty counts from armed conflict measure in the thousands to tens of thousands; not the hundreds of thousands or millions that you'd see in a major war. But that still doesn't make what the US does in regards to surveillance right. Can there be world peace without a dominant military power to keep everyone in check? I don't know, but we should at least try to find out.
privacy101 11y ago
Economic and political espionage are probably the main goals if this mass spying.

ihsw 11y ago

Indeed, 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 ago
From 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.
- ihsw 11y ago
  Honestly, regarding Saudi Arabia, I think their strategy is to buy as much equipment as possible so that the West has no choice but to prop up the House of Saud. Why do they have no choice? Well, if the House of Saud falls then the weapons would reach the hands of jihadist terrorists before you can say "9/11," and the Royal Saudi Army has a very large stockpile of all of the best hardware you can buy with petrodollars.
  - lifeisstillgood 11y ago
    An airforce able to rival the Marines does not "fall into the hands of terrorists". Saudi Arabia wants to be a regional power and wants to back that up with force. Oh and suppress domestic unrest.
- jqm 11y ago
  "As for Saudi Arabia, their government is just about as bad as Assad on human rights" They are a whole lot worse.
  - dsfyu404ed 11y ago
    It's hard to be worse than mustard gas...
    - jqm 11y ago
      Did Assad actually use mustard gas? Is stockpiling mustard gas better or worse than stockpiling nuclear missiles? Just things to think about. As for human rights... KSA is considerably worse than Assad.

rtl49 11y ago

Possibly so, though if you believe this, presumably the powers that be would not be above fabricating such evidence. Bear in mind that the data used in this article are from arrest records. In fact, many of the arrests supposedly resulting from online activity could just as easily have occurred because of reports by concerned citizens. Would you put it past the authorities to seize a suspected terrorist identified through dragnet surveillance without creating a record of arrest? I think it is not inconceivable. If you are opposed to mass surveillance, I think the best argument is that its social costs surpass the benefit of reducing terrorism. But perhaps this is not such a palatable argument after two well-publicized tragedies.

brlewis 11y ago
You speak of "the benefit of reducing terrorism" as if it's a given rather than a hypothetical possibility.
- rtl49 11y ago
  No I don't. There I grant the opposition their belief as a stipulation for the purpose of making a more salient point: terrorism is not so destructive as people tend to think, and regulating the flow of information is more destructive than people tend to think. Thus we avoid the challenge of quantifying mass surveillance's efficacy in reducing terrorism.

jacobolus 11y ago

30 years is a pretty short time horizon to look at. Western meddling as a driver of chaos and authoritarianism in the Middle East stretches back at least a century or two. If Europeans hadn’t drawn completely arbitrary national borders all over the region after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, if Palestine had been left to its Arab inhabitants instead of displacing them in favor of European Jews, if the British and Americans hadn’t put so much emphasis on securing the Suez Canal via support for friendly dictatorships nearby, if the US hadn’t toppled the Iranian democracy under Mosaddegh in 1953 to reinstall the Shah, if Western European, Russian, and American guns hadn’t been handed out on all sides like candy, etc., the region would certainly be far different from now. But it’s impossible to guess exactly what the effects of some counterfactual foreign policy over the past century would be.

mc32 11y ago
Arbitrary borders doesn't explain it all. Africa has just as many arbitrary borders and lots of wars and insurrection happened and continue to happen, but except for north Africa, sub-Saharan Africa doesn't suffer the same kind of chaos and terrorism except for where isil AQ, etc have operatives. So, Africa seems to indicate that terrorism requires a foreign religious aspect in order to take root.
- api 11y ago
  I'm sure the fact that the Middle East sits on the world's largest deposits of cheap-to-extract high-EROEI and therefore maximally profitable oil has absolutely nothing to do with it. :) The amount of oil in the ground in places like Canada might indeed rival the Middle East, but it's lower-EROEI more expensive oil. The amount of money in the ground is higher in the Middle East than anywhere else. Sub-Saharan Africa does have quite a bit of resource wealth but it doesn't have anywhere near as fat and juicy a prize as the ME does.
  - mc32 11y ago
    So how does that explain Yemen, or the troubles in the Philippines? Are they overflowing with rich resources? Contrast Mindanao with the rest of the PH.

merpnderp 11y ago

Wikileaks shows that the US and allies have been financing and working towards instability in Syria since 2007. Maybe working with Russia to temper Assad would have been a better solution, or perhaps some other avenue. But overthrowing Assad has been an epic disaster and more surveillance isn't the answer.

dsfyu404ed 11y ago
"Maybe working with Russia to temper Assad would have been a better solution" I believe the word you're searching for is "banana republic"
- merpnderp 11y ago
  Japan, S. Korea, and Taiwan were at some point in their current governments, little more than puppet governments of the US. A corrupt puppet of a US+Turkey+Saudi/Russian+Chinese+Iranian coalition that at least offered stability would be far preferable to the murderous chaos that exists now.

arca_vorago 11y ago

"true goal of all the governments and agencies is...a power-play for the control of information." You sir, are very close to the truth. The reality is that it isn't about control of the information per se, but what can be accomplished with said information. In this case, the "information" we are referring to is the massive amount of metadata we generate, not to mention the content thereof, and I would posit that the true goal is the control of the people, through ownership of the information. The distinction is a small but important one. It is about control, not security, and anybody saying otherwise is generally ill-informed or ignorant. From an intelligence side of things, it used to take so much effort to do dirty tricks on people. You had to black bag their place of residence, you had to tail them for days, weeks, sometimes months. These days, you just PRISM/ECHELON your way into their data, pull all the dirt you need out, and approach them with your demands as you will. This is only one of the most palpable dangers of the surveillance age, in that the intel agencies and potential moles/infiltrators can potentially have vast amounts of power over institutions they shouldn't, for example, congress. It's essentially setting us up for a coup d'etat of the oligarchy. (people need to remember that the OSS/CIA came straight out of London/WallStreet! I think people should also be made aware of the often at odds nature of the different intel agencies. I think military intelligence is rightly suspicious of the Company.) I spent a long time trying to understand this machine because I was an action arm of it at one time (and perhaps if called upon, may one day again be), and my conclusions are not hopeful, pretty, and often are considered conspiracy theory. What I have said above only scratches the surface.

fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
per se https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases_%28P%29#per_se https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_phrases_%28P%29#...
- arca_vorago 11y ago
  Thank you for the correction, mental note added and comment edited.
heroh 11y ago
>What I have said above only scratches the surface. keep going. be aware the analytical & technically savy are also considered threats to the establishment: "NSA: Linux Journal is an "extremist forum" and its readers get flagged for extra surveillance" http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/nsa-linux-journal-extremist-forum-and-its-readers-get-flagged-extra-surveillance http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/nsa-linux-journal-extrem...

sampo 11y ago

> Financing the Taliban and Bin-laden to fight the soviets in the 80's Can anyone make guesses how Afghanistan would have turned out if the Soviets had been let to freely occupy Afghanistan? Would the country have turned into another North Korea, or perhaps something like Afghanistan's northern neighbors, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, are today? Or would the secular socialistic and religious elements have gone into civil war anyway, even without the US supporting the religious side?

chimeracoder 11y ago
Honestly? Afghanistan's a really difficult region to unify politically; it's only happened a handful of times in history. On top of that, the global trend in the last ~100 years has been towards nationalism and away from consolidated, sprawling empires. Due to the geography and ethnic composition of Afghanistan, it's highly unlikely that the Soviets would have been able to do exercise much control over it in the long-run with any semblance of stability[0]. So I'd be very skeptical of the idea that it would have turned into anything resembling North Korea. In all honesty, it would probably look relatively similar to what it does today. In that alternate universe, it wouldn't necessarily be the Taliban itself that came to power, but the group that occupied that role would be similar in ideology and effect to the Taliban that exists in this universe. [0] ignoring the pending collapse of the USSR, of course, but since this is all speculation anyway, we can take some liberties.
- mahyarm 11y ago
  Would a balkanized afghanistan be politically stable eventually then?
  - chimeracoder 11y ago
    We're talking about a country that's been used essentially as a pawn by the major imperial powers of each era for the last 200+ years. (This situation is not unique to Afghanistan - which is why many other countries have similar problems - but Afghanistan's geography compounds the effect). The British, Russians, US, Ottomans, Mughals, Safavids - all of them have spent significant time and effort (not to mention military power) trying to secure the region for "their" side. All of them struggled with it, to the point where it's debatable whether any of them ever succeeded. This situation continues on today - so no, I don't think Afghanistan can ever be politically stable as long as it continues to hold this role in global geopolitics[0]. Perhaps circumstances will change and we'll start to see a more stable regime emerge there, but it's kind of hard to force that when one of the major causes for instability in the last two centuries has been external influence in the first place. EDIT: Unrelated to the answer, but I find the use of the word 'balkanized' particularly amusing given the etymology (it refers to the fragmentation of parts of the former Ottoman empire into many states that compete with each other for regional influence). Afghanistan is not part of the Balkan peninsula, but it did have its own fascinating power struggle with the Ottoman empire, and the breakup of the Ottoman empire in the early 20th century was a major turning point that influenced the current state of Afghanistan today. [0] I'm not sure any country really could be, for what it's worth, but we're talking about Afghanistan.

happyscrappy 11y ago

>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. This is a laughable statement but typically upvoted on HN. Politicians have to appear to have done everything possible to prevent these attacks. They are not dictators, if the public feels they were soft on terror they are gone, no pentaverate necessary.

indrax 11y ago
>appear >public feels You did not make a counterargument.

exelius 11y ago

So I am of two minds with regards to foreign intervention by the US. On one hand, I'm horrified at the things the US does. We kill innocents, we send our own citizens to die for really very little reason, and we spend an epic fuck ton of money with very little to show in terms of tactical results. We stick our nose in situations that don't involve us just because we can, and I'm tired of the US always being the world's police force. On the other hand, global power politics aren't about playing nice. As far as hegemonist world powers throughout history go, the US is relatively benevolent (wiretaps and extrajudicial renditions are nothing compared to the genocides perpetrated by nearly every preceding global power). In the absence of a dominant global power, you would have multiple equally-matched regional powers vying for supremacy -- a situation that would almost certainly end in war and the emergence of a new, potentially less benevolent global power. A lot of innocent people likely die in this scenario too. The world is undoubtedly a safer place because the US does horrible things to bad people (and yes, at times to good people too). The fact that there is a single superpower that can and will defeat anyone, anywhere deters a lot of large-scale bad behavior -- the last 70 years since WWII have been some of the most peaceful in human history. Casualty counts from armed conflict measure in the thousands to tens of thousands; not the hundreds of thousands or millions that you'd see in a major war. But that still doesn't make what the US does in regards to surveillance right. Can there be world peace without a dominant military power to keep everyone in check? I don't know, but we should at least try to find out.

privacy101 11y ago

Economic and political espionage are probably the main goals if this mass spying.