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Why it’s so hard to keep up with how the U.S. gov't is spying on its own people

160 points by Libertatea 11y ago

voidz 11y ago
"There is a reason for all the secrecy: The government argues it has a vested interest in keeping capabilities secret so that terrorists and other targets aren't able to figure out how to evade surveillance. That's one of the reasons some intelligence officials were quick to blame Snowden in the wake of the recent Paris attacks, arguing his revelations may have given terrorists a road map for how evade detection." Didn't they use unencrypted SMS messages to coordinate?
- etiam 11y ago
  "But no evidence has yet emerged that the attacks were coordinated using tools that protected communications through encryption, a security tool Snowden often recommends to everyday users looking to ensure their digital privacy. In fact, the information available so far suggests that the attackers sent an unencrypted text to coordinate the launch of the attack, and several of them had been known to Belgian investigators."
  - voidz 11y ago
    Oh. Thanks. Seems I misunderstood "text" in this context... In our country we're used to calling this SMS messages and I can never get used to "text messages". Hat tip to you.
- txru 11y ago
  They've just been waiting to use phrases like these since Snowden went public. There just hasn't been a large enough terror attack to justify it.
jimrandomh 11y ago
The shell game is as much for the courts as it is for the people. The courts have demonstrated a de facto inability to enforce judgments and subpoenas against the US intelligence community, and part of the trick is obfuscating responsibility.
cryoshon 11y ago
FTA: ""This is yet another trick move in the never-ending shell game that the NSA is playing with the American people, and apparently with the secret court whose oversight it is trying to evade," said Kevin Bankston, the director of New America's Open Technology Institute. "New rule: if the NSA claims that a particular surveillance program has ended, or that a particular type of surveillance has halted 'under this program,' assume that it is still going on in another program."" It's hard to keep up with the latest abuses because, as the article mentions explicitly, the government is perpetually playing a shell game with its surveillance programs in order to deceive the public and its other enemies which the programs target. The government works from the assumption that an outed surveillance program is a surveillance program rendered ineffective, meaning that there's consistent internal pressure to reorganize, rename, and reconfigure existing programs that get hit with daylight. In order to kneecap oversight, regulatory questions are answered as literally as possible, using the most deceptive and narrow terms as possible. The terms that they use are typically internally defined in bizarre and obtuse ways for the purposes of propaganda, and these definitions are never made explicitly clear to the public or regulators. This is how we get to the point of a very straightforward, unambiguous term such as "collection" actually being defined by the NSA as "processing data for intelligence purposes after it has been found, categorized, scraped via algorithm, and stored." In summary: it's hard to keep up because the surveillance agencies are intentionally being evasive of public and political oversight, because they are engaged in immoral programs which are perpetually extralegal. EDIT: An additional bonus of this maskirovka-style strategy is that the press will be bungled up habitually by reporting in the government's desired terms. This means that if the press even does understand the true meanings of the propaganda terms used, the public will be getting a confusing and often inconsistent narrative that is hard to make sense of. The press will also typically publish articles detailing the denial of wrongdoing from the government, and will rarely publish the highly detailed and factual accusations of wrongdoing in the first place.
- reacweb 11y ago
  Some illegal activities of IC may happen. I consider it acceptable as long as it is really small scale. In order to fight terrorism efficiently, we may need some large scale monitoring of phones (and/ot car movements). These large scale monitoring should be unambigously regulated. The principle of separation of powers (I am french) should apply.
DickingAround 11y ago
This all makes a lot more sense if you just accept that the government isn't 'working for you' or however people think of it these days. They're working for them. They're playing a shell game to work around you. Not exactly breaking news when we have long-standing political families and parties. It's not a new thing. There is a political ruling class. We're not in it and the people who are like this ability so they're going to hoodwink us to keep it. It's just that simple.
- cryoshon 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite#Power_.C3.A9lites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite#Power_.C3.A9lites It's been a lot longer than just recent days that surveillance agencies have had their top members inside of the power elite. J. Edgar Hoover ran the country for quite some time without any real democratic process to stop him.
  - jxm262 11y ago
    Thanks, this wiki article is actually pretty interesting. I'm looking through their numbers, and while I don't doubt them, I wonder if there's any more reference information (books, etc.) that corroborate this data.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  This is why I believe that the democratic mindset is harmful, though not democracy in of itself. The democratic mindset is one convinced that the citizenry have absolute control because of the mere presence of some form of electoral system. The democratic mindset then proceeds to blame all failures on the agent and routinely excuses all wrongdoings of the principal. If a democratically elected leader is repressive, the blame is put on those who voted for them and on those who did not (for "failing" to vote for someone else who may have been just as repressive anyway). Democracy encourages this kind of victim blaming through and through, and it reduces any political problem to Just A Simple Matter of Voting. (It's even worse in FPTP systems because of the spoilt vote effect. There, if you actually do take the advice of the democratic mindset and vote for the candidate you see as just, you will again be blamed for depriving the more mainstream "lesser evil" candidate and therefore being responsible for the deeds of the ultimate winner. You voted for Ralph Nader, which means you stole Al Gore's victory, which means you started the Iraq War!)
iamsohungry 11y ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again: when law enforcement compromises the security of a network without a warrant, they need to be prosecuted and jailed under the same law that any other hackers breaking the law would be. As long as there are no consequences for breaking the law, the NSA will continue breaking the law.
- cryoshon 11y ago
  The US has a long tradition of not jailing its political lawbreakers, though. The way they pitch immunity in this case is to claim that a prosecution of an NSA official that broke the law would cause the remaining NSA employees to be on-guard for lawbreaking, and too busy to watching their ass to do their job at the NSA effectively, leading to terrorist attacks against the US. In effect, they say that it is unreasonable for us to expect the NSA to both obey the law and do their jobs. Nevermind that they've re-written the laws to make their invasive surveillance completely legal.
  - iamsohungry 11y ago
    > The way they pitch immunity in this case is to claim that a prosecution of an NSA official that broke the law would cause the remaining NSA employees to be on-guard for lawbreaking, Good. Government officials should be on guard for lawbreaking.
mtgx 11y ago
Because the so called "oversight" committees are acting like the NSA's biggest cheerleaders, instead of making sure they don't exceed their legal powers. Feinstein even admitted after the Snowden revelations that she wasn't even aware of many of the leaked programs NSA uses. A failure to punish the abuses only increases the number of abuses, as they learn that they can "get away with it" with no accountability.
misiti3780 11y ago
From what I have witnessed, the average American I come into contact with still doesn't seem to care about the spying. I have recently had conversations in the past week since the Paris attacks with a few people that seemed to really believe Snowden's leaks were a big reason this happened and anyone who has "nothing to hide" should support the dragnet NSA policies. The sad thing is that the US intelligence community apparently notified the French spooks about the possibility of an impending ISIS attack(s) (which seems ambiguous, after all, an attack could occur anywhere) and a few of the attackers were on fundamentalist watch lists, and yet the attacks still happened. Yet no major media outlet has (at least that I have seen) identified this as an example of a failure of the US/EU ICs. Glenn Greenwald was on CNN yesterday throwing CNN's anchor under the bus for allowing all these major IC talking heads to come on and blame snowden, talk up dragnet, etc. - it was pretty interesting. Terrorist attacks, which are black swan events, are not preventable. So if I have to deal with them, I would rather deal with them without the dragnet than with it. I also cant think of a single example of the NSA/CIA preventing a major terrorist attack in the US (at lets face it, if they had one, they would have used this as a shining example by now). All of the attacks that were thwarted were just by luck: shoe bomber, underwear bomber, time square bomber, etc.
- brentm 11y ago
  > I also cant think of a single example of the NSA/CIA preventing a major terrorist attack in the US. 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...
  - fweespeech 11y ago
    That list is largely FBI and domestic law enforcement, not CIA/NSA.
- cryoshon 11y ago
  Authority and propaganda weigh very heavily on people's perspectives; it is an idea of mine that the American 21st century propaganda regime is the strongest in history thus far. For the people who accept authority as the source of ideas, the anti-surveillance/pro-privacy movement is a non-starter because the dominant military figures say it's harmful, and their word is king because they are the top of the hierarchy. We have now lost about 40% (maybe more, or maybe less? I made up that number based off of how many people vote Republican because conservatives are traditionally associated with being more authority-compliant) of people with this exclusion. That leaves the remaining 60% of the population, for which there is pervasive propaganda. The mainstream media outlets mention the surveillance issue only in passing, and typically give undue weight and time to government accounts, leading to a skewed perspective. People like Greenwald/Snowden get very little airtime, and when they do, they're framed as eccentric outsiders (social undesirables) who have a stupid opinion that the news is obligated to share to appear "balanced". EDIT: Clarified my Republicans comment a bit. The main thrust is that there is a large population of people who are going to be swayed by authority figures, and these people tend to be politically conservative.
known 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority
oldpond 11y ago
If your email account is hosted on the Cloud on US soil, and the email provider decides to migrate that part of their Cloud to the Philippines, for example, would that email come under the purview of the new program and be considered "outside" the US?
eip 11y ago
Most people want to be able to subdue and/or kill other human beings which disturb their daily lives, but they do not want to have to cope with the moral and religious issues which such an overt act on their part might raise. Therefore, they assign the dirty work to others (including their own children) so as to keep the blood off their hands. They rave about the humane treatment of animals and then sit down to a delicious hamburger from a whitewashed slaughterhouse down the street and out of sight. But even more hypocritical, they pay taxes to finance a professional association of hit men collectively called politicians, and then complain about corruption in government. http://www.lawfulpath.com/ref/sw4qw/index.shtml#twentyfour http://www.lawfulpath.com/ref/sw4qw/index.shtml#twentyfour

160 points by Libertatea 11y ago

voidz 11y ago

"There is a reason for all the secrecy: The government argues it has a vested interest in keeping capabilities secret so that terrorists and other targets aren't able to figure out how to evade surveillance. That's one of the reasons some intelligence officials were quick to blame Snowden in the wake of the recent Paris attacks, arguing his revelations may have given terrorists a road map for how evade detection." Didn't they use unencrypted SMS messages to coordinate?

etiam 11y ago
"But no evidence has yet emerged that the attacks were coordinated using tools that protected communications through encryption, a security tool Snowden often recommends to everyday users looking to ensure their digital privacy. In fact, the information available so far suggests that the attackers sent an unencrypted text to coordinate the launch of the attack, and several of them had been known to Belgian investigators."
- voidz 11y ago
  Oh. Thanks. Seems I misunderstood "text" in this context... In our country we're used to calling this SMS messages and I can never get used to "text messages". Hat tip to you.
txru 11y ago
They've just been waiting to use phrases like these since Snowden went public. There just hasn't been a large enough terror attack to justify it.

jimrandomh 11y ago

The shell game is as much for the courts as it is for the people. The courts have demonstrated a de facto inability to enforce judgments and subpoenas against the US intelligence community, and part of the trick is obfuscating responsibility.

cryoshon 11y ago

FTA: ""This is yet another trick move in the never-ending shell game that the NSA is playing with the American people, and apparently with the secret court whose oversight it is trying to evade," said Kevin Bankston, the director of New America's Open Technology Institute. "New rule: if the NSA claims that a particular surveillance program has ended, or that a particular type of surveillance has halted 'under this program,' assume that it is still going on in another program."" It's hard to keep up with the latest abuses because, as the article mentions explicitly, the government is perpetually playing a shell game with its surveillance programs in order to deceive the public and its other enemies which the programs target. The government works from the assumption that an outed surveillance program is a surveillance program rendered ineffective, meaning that there's consistent internal pressure to reorganize, rename, and reconfigure existing programs that get hit with daylight. In order to kneecap oversight, regulatory questions are answered as literally as possible, using the most deceptive and narrow terms as possible. The terms that they use are typically internally defined in bizarre and obtuse ways for the purposes of propaganda, and these definitions are never made explicitly clear to the public or regulators. This is how we get to the point of a very straightforward, unambiguous term such as "collection" actually being defined by the NSA as "processing data for intelligence purposes after it has been found, categorized, scraped via algorithm, and stored." In summary: it's hard to keep up because the surveillance agencies are intentionally being evasive of public and political oversight, because they are engaged in immoral programs which are perpetually extralegal. EDIT: An additional bonus of this maskirovka-style strategy is that the press will be bungled up habitually by reporting in the government's desired terms. This means that if the press even does understand the true meanings of the propaganda terms used, the public will be getting a confusing and often inconsistent narrative that is hard to make sense of. The press will also typically publish articles detailing the denial of wrongdoing from the government, and will rarely publish the highly detailed and factual accusations of wrongdoing in the first place.

reacweb 11y ago
Some illegal activities of IC may happen. I consider it acceptable as long as it is really small scale. In order to fight terrorism efficiently, we may need some large scale monitoring of phones (and/ot car movements). These large scale monitoring should be unambigously regulated. The principle of separation of powers (I am french) should apply.

DickingAround 11y ago

This all makes a lot more sense if you just accept that the government isn't 'working for you' or however people think of it these days. They're working for them. They're playing a shell game to work around you. Not exactly breaking news when we have long-standing political families and parties. It's not a new thing. There is a political ruling class. We're not in it and the people who are like this ability so they're going to hoodwink us to keep it. It's just that simple.

cryoshon 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite#Power_.C3.A9lites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite#Power_.C3.A9lites It's been a lot longer than just recent days that surveillance agencies have had their top members inside of the power elite. J. Edgar Hoover ran the country for quite some time without any real democratic process to stop him.
- jxm262 11y ago
  Thanks, this wiki article is actually pretty interesting. I'm looking through their numbers, and while I don't doubt them, I wonder if there's any more reference information (books, etc.) that corroborate this data.
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
This is why I believe that the democratic mindset is harmful, though not democracy in of itself. The democratic mindset is one convinced that the citizenry have absolute control because of the mere presence of some form of electoral system. The democratic mindset then proceeds to blame all failures on the agent and routinely excuses all wrongdoings of the principal. If a democratically elected leader is repressive, the blame is put on those who voted for them and on those who did not (for "failing" to vote for someone else who may have been just as repressive anyway). Democracy encourages this kind of victim blaming through and through, and it reduces any political problem to Just A Simple Matter of Voting. (It's even worse in FPTP systems because of the spoilt vote effect. There, if you actually do take the advice of the democratic mindset and vote for the candidate you see as just, you will again be blamed for depriving the more mainstream "lesser evil" candidate and therefore being responsible for the deeds of the ultimate winner. You voted for Ralph Nader, which means you stole Al Gore's victory, which means you started the Iraq War!)

iamsohungry 11y ago

I've said it before and I'll say it again: when law enforcement compromises the security of a network without a warrant, they need to be prosecuted and jailed under the same law that any other hackers breaking the law would be. As long as there are no consequences for breaking the law, the NSA will continue breaking the law.

cryoshon 11y ago
The US has a long tradition of not jailing its political lawbreakers, though. The way they pitch immunity in this case is to claim that a prosecution of an NSA official that broke the law would cause the remaining NSA employees to be on-guard for lawbreaking, and too busy to watching their ass to do their job at the NSA effectively, leading to terrorist attacks against the US. In effect, they say that it is unreasonable for us to expect the NSA to both obey the law and do their jobs. Nevermind that they've re-written the laws to make their invasive surveillance completely legal.
- iamsohungry 11y ago
  > The way they pitch immunity in this case is to claim that a prosecution of an NSA official that broke the law would cause the remaining NSA employees to be on-guard for lawbreaking, Good. Government officials should be on guard for lawbreaking.

mtgx 11y ago

Because the so called "oversight" committees are acting like the NSA's biggest cheerleaders, instead of making sure they don't exceed their legal powers. Feinstein even admitted after the Snowden revelations that she wasn't even aware of many of the leaked programs NSA uses. A failure to punish the abuses only increases the number of abuses, as they learn that they can "get away with it" with no accountability.

misiti3780 11y ago

From what I have witnessed, the average American I come into contact with still doesn't seem to care about the spying. I have recently had conversations in the past week since the Paris attacks with a few people that seemed to really believe Snowden's leaks were a big reason this happened and anyone who has "nothing to hide" should support the dragnet NSA policies. The sad thing is that the US intelligence community apparently notified the French spooks about the possibility of an impending ISIS attack(s) (which seems ambiguous, after all, an attack could occur anywhere) and a few of the attackers were on fundamentalist watch lists, and yet the attacks still happened. Yet no major media outlet has (at least that I have seen) identified this as an example of a failure of the US/EU ICs. Glenn Greenwald was on CNN yesterday throwing CNN's anchor under the bus for allowing all these major IC talking heads to come on and blame snowden, talk up dragnet, etc. - it was pretty interesting. Terrorist attacks, which are black swan events, are not preventable. So if I have to deal with them, I would rather deal with them without the dragnet than with it. I also cant think of a single example of the NSA/CIA preventing a major terrorist attack in the US (at lets face it, if they had one, they would have used this as a shining example by now). All of the attacks that were thwarted were just by luck: shoe bomber, underwear bomber, time square bomber, etc.

brentm 11y ago
> I also cant think of a single example of the NSA/CIA preventing a major terrorist attack in the US. 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...
- fweespeech 11y ago
  That list is largely FBI and domestic law enforcement, not CIA/NSA.
cryoshon 11y ago
Authority and propaganda weigh very heavily on people's perspectives; it is an idea of mine that the American 21st century propaganda regime is the strongest in history thus far. For the people who accept authority as the source of ideas, the anti-surveillance/pro-privacy movement is a non-starter because the dominant military figures say it's harmful, and their word is king because they are the top of the hierarchy. We have now lost about 40% (maybe more, or maybe less? I made up that number based off of how many people vote Republican because conservatives are traditionally associated with being more authority-compliant) of people with this exclusion. That leaves the remaining 60% of the population, for which there is pervasive propaganda. The mainstream media outlets mention the surveillance issue only in passing, and typically give undue weight and time to government accounts, leading to a skewed perspective. People like Greenwald/Snowden get very little airtime, and when they do, they're framed as eccentric outsiders (social undesirables) who have a stupid opinion that the news is obligated to share to appear "balanced". EDIT: Clarified my Republicans comment a bit. The main thrust is that there is a large population of people who are going to be swayed by authority figures, and these people tend to be politically conservative.

known 11y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority

oldpond 11y ago

If your email account is hosted on the Cloud on US soil, and the email provider decides to migrate that part of their Cloud to the Philippines, for example, would that email come under the purview of the new program and be considered "outside" the US?

eip 11y ago

Most people want to be able to subdue and/or kill other human beings which disturb their daily lives, but they do not want to have to cope with the moral and religious issues which such an overt act on their part might raise. Therefore, they assign the dirty work to others (including their own children) so as to keep the blood off their hands. They rave about the humane treatment of animals and then sit down to a delicious hamburger from a whitewashed slaughterhouse down the street and out of sight. But even more hypocritical, they pay taxes to finance a professional association of hit men collectively called politicians, and then complain about corruption in government. http://www.lawfulpath.com/ref/sw4qw/index.shtml#twentyfour http://www.lawfulpath.com/ref/sw4qw/index.shtml#twentyfour