11 ms·

I, as a taxpayer, pay the NSA to be effective in defending national interests, to act with integrity, and to submit themselves to the oversight of my representa

I, as a taxpayer, pay the NSA to be effective in defending national interests, to act with integrity, and to submit themselves to the oversight of my representatives in Congress. I have no expectation that they will be honest or open with me. Being closed is integral to their work. However they damn well better submit to oversight and respect my constitutional rights as a citizen.

volkk 9y ago
Sort of a catch 22 there, right? You expect integrity, but without honesty/openness, how do you hold them to it?
- dsjoerg 9y ago
  You elect representatives and executives who are given security clearances and the right to great transparency and openness. When or if those elected officials are found to have abused the public trust, you punish them, their associates and their successors at the ballot box and in the court of public opinion. It's not a great process but I don't see a better way for a democracy to have an internationally competitive intelligence apparatus. And without such an apparatus we are exposed to attacks on our democratic integrity, military effectiveness, deliberative privacy and much more.
  - vthallam 9y ago
    That'd work in an ideal world, not here. In a 2 party system which are increasingly polarizing you'd have the pressure to stick to the party line.
    - drusepth 9y ago
      Even in our current world, some issues' importance outweighs sticking to the party line. Luckily, we have more than two parties to vote for, so it's not quite as black and white as that.
      - tambienben 9y ago
        >Luckily, we have more than two parties to vote for Not to most americans--especially when it comes time to vote.
        drusepth 9y ago
        There's a real catch-22: the multiple other parties we (in the US) are capable of voting for will never have a chance at winning if we don't treat them as real alternatives to the entrenched two. There's a reason both D's and R's repeat the lines "voting for a third party is a wasted vote" and play the polarizing "if you vote third party, you're voting for <opposite party>" card each election season. It may be partially true at the time, but also implies there are only two parties that can actually win -- which is something that can easily change, especially as D's and R's both move further towards the end of their respective spectrums.
        mraler 9y ago
        I think the key is to vote third (alternative?) party in smaller elections (mayor, state senate), and then work up. Voting third party for congress is mostly a waste of time for now, and it doesn't seem likely that we're going to see a massive enough shift in voter participation to change that all in one go, but I think with enough effort to build up non-D/R party support at the local level that could change a lot faster than most people think. I'm less optimistic about the presidency, really. I doubt the reigning parties will let that slip out of their hands.
  - zipwitch 9y ago
    We are currently paying the costs (both monetary and otherwise) for the apparatus you describe, but looking at the last decade, the benefits appear to be absent. Perhaps we need to consider the possibility that an organization like the NSA just isn't worth having?
    - drusepth 9y ago
      By nature of the secrecy required by how the NSA operates, many of the benefits would likewise not be made public (to avoid sharing unnecessary information on how they operate), so I'm not entirely sure it's fair for any of us out of the know to weigh the benefits versus the costs in this way. Our elected members privy to the actual costs and the actual benefits should be the ones making the decision on whether the NSA is worth having or not.
    - bradyd 9y ago
      In fact organizations like the CIA and NSA are more of a threat to the American people than the people they are supposedly protecting us from.
      - williamdclt 9y ago
        Not necessarily disagreeing but: facts? numbers? source?
      - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        I suspect it's like inoculation: some people die from inoculations, but on the whole the herd gains valuable protection. The TLA may be terrible for particular individuals, or small groups with a shared characteristic, but politicians should nonetheless advocate for them to protect the "way of life of citizens". It's a "do you keep a guard dog that you know might maul a child" type of question.
    - willstrafach 9y ago
      Your comment shows why some more open-ness would be great for everyone. Working in secret means nobody will know of the genuine successes, only the allegedly problematic aspects which leak out. It might not be simple, but I am sure that it would be possible to remove classified details from certain “wins” (whether counterterror, counterproliferation, or other) and let the public know what their tax dollars are going toward.
  - volkk 9y ago
    Sure, that's sort of what I meant in terms of openness. I don't expect them to leak their secrets in some public memorandum, but I expect them to be fully transparent with the representatives that we elect. However, the question is--are the representatives doing the best job representing us given this sensitive information they're privy to? Who's to say the NSA isn't asking, "just write that we're doing well in this report, its for the better of this country long term." And how do we catch/stop this?
    - aeorgnoieang 9y ago
      This may be the most extreme version of the principle-agent problem. Without leaking or sharing at least some information, it's impossible for the public to hold them accountable. This seems like a fundamental impossibility; not just a matter of the 'wrong' people being privy to the same secrets. For one reason, there's no way we can know if our representatives are even privy to all the information to which they're entitled. Hell, even with a lot of information being leaked it still seems basically impossible to hold them accountable!
    - willstrafach 9y ago
      The HPSCI and SSCI do seem like reasonable checks. Ron Wyden especially has a good track record of calling out things he sees as problematic.
  - merpnderp 9y ago
    James Clapper lies to senate intelligence committee and is outed only days later. On March 13th the statue of limitations runs out on prosecuting this crime. This data is misused and no one is punished, even for the overtly blatant crimes.
    - cmurf 9y ago
      This is specious, and exposes deep naiveté about the law as well as protocol at hearings. The director was put into the position of either lying to Congress or disclosing state secrets. Insofar as the law is concerned, exposing state secrets is a far worse offense. That's just the way it works, and if you don't like it, this particular instance isn't the moment to get into a pissing contest about what public policies you don't like, and all the dumb secrets the government keeps from us, but insists we keep on paying for. You should have been more proactive a long time before this, because this moment was being set up over a decade before it happened in public. Clapper lying is an inevitable outcome of a hyper-survellience state, which is an inevitable outcome of a servile and paranoid society. The senator should not have asked the question in an open session if the idea was to get an honest answer. If you're a senator on the intel committee, you ask this sort of question in an open session if you're trying to make a public case that we have too many secrets. And that's exactly what that whole sequence exposes, but per usual, someone from the ignorant mass wants to hang a single person out to dry for the decisions society has made.
      - merpnderp 9y ago
        Ignorant? You mean like the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is supposed to have classified oversight of America's spy agencies? Maybe you should bone up on the details yourself, before slandering others as ignorant. Never mind Clapper could have simply refused to answer the question. But yes, please continue to cover for spies dodging their legal responsibility to comply with full Congressional oversight.
  - roywiggins 9y ago
    Another option is, in addition to trustworthy elected officials, you can have some sort of independent oversight that isn't partisan and is independent of whoever is in charge of the executive. The UK has something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Reviewer_of_Terrorism_Legislation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Reviewer_of_Terror...
- NegativeLatency 9y ago
  Ideally congress would provide oversight. Unfortunately in today's world members of congress seem to be ok with the continued overreach of surveillance.
  - PeterisP 9y ago
    Isn't congress the set of people who are literally given the right (and responsibility) to define, by passing laws, what is ok and what's not? If they consider that it's ok, then it's ok; that's how the democratically elected representatives have decided.
- drusepth 9y ago
  I expect the oversight they are subject to that is also privy to their private actions to hold them to it. I'm curious about what all they do, but at best all I could do is complain on social media about it (which some people actually think is the best approach here). I mean, what else can someone actually do? There can easily be honesty and integrity without openness to everyone.
- PeterisP 9y ago
  You'd expect them to be open and honest to the officials who are managing and reviewing them, but opaque and occasionally intentionally misleading to the wider general public.
equalunique 9y ago
>However they damn well better submit to oversight James Clapper lied to the Senate intelligence committee about the existence of NSA bulk data collection. Infuriating.
- dopamean 9y ago
  I'm normally not in the business of defending government agencies but wasn't that interview done in an open forum? Perhaps he would have been more honest if the information wasn't going to be immediately reported on in the media.
  - merpnderp 9y ago
    He was testifying in front of Congress. Perjury is what he did. He later waffled about not being able to answer truthfully because of the surveillance being classified - yet he answered.
    - gizmo385 9y ago
      I'm legitimately curious here: Is it possible that he submitted additional testimony after the fact to the committee that he was testifying before? Or discussed the issue in a closed setting where classified material could be discussed?
      - dopamean 9y ago
        I'm wondering the same thing. It seems to me that people who have classified information that shouldn't be released to the public shouldn't be put in a position to have to lie about it under oath.
jessriedel 9y ago
That argument works better for openness than honesty. How often do they need to outright lie to citizens to protect national security?
dfsegoat 9y ago
If history is any judge, as I recall from several recent reads on NSA post-Snowden / Stuxnet etc: Even the most outspoken critic of the NSA (I want to say it was a State attorney or something) was quick to reverse his critiques when he was granted control of an oversight investigation - he was actually shocked at the amount of integrity and openness that he found WITHIN the organization. Doesn't mean it is visible to others. I'll try to find the references.
- jackhack 9y ago
  I wonder how much blackmail material he was shown just before he dramatically reversed his opinion. I am very cynical. But then a long chain of recorded history rewards my point of view.
  - not_kurt_godel 9y ago
    I wonder how many PR bots the NSA has on sites like Hacker News.
    - moftz 9y ago
      They are a government agency with a nearly endless supply of money granted to them by Congress every year without fail. They don't need to do PR for anyone except to gain more employees.
      - not_kurt_godel 9y ago
        > They don't need to do PR for anyone except to gain more employees. Which is exactly why I implied they would be primarily doing PR on sites with high concentrations of people with the skillsets they need...such as Hacker News. This would help them both directly - individuals seeing good PR and thinking "hey, I could work there" - and indirectly by way of combating the general negative perceptions of the NSA in the tech community since the Snowden leaks.
      - mistermann 9y ago
chimen 9y ago
How do you know they are acting with integrity without them being honest or open? It looks like a free ticket to do whatever they like and play the "trust us to be defending national interests" card whenever they see fit.
- olfactory 9y ago
  This is correct. Honesty would entail being honest with congress or with those who have been authorized to have appropriate clearance. So removing it as a core value reveals that the agency views its mission as having situations where it would reasonably veer away from such honesty.
- tw04 9y ago
  That's the importance of a free press. If they are violating our constitutional rights, the press should (ethically) be reporting on those violations. See: Edward Snowden. Now, it is our representatives jobs to protect whistle blowers like Snowden, and unfortunately the general public either doesn't care, or doesn't want to take the time to truly understand what it means to have our privacy violated.
devoply 9y ago
> However they damn well better submit to oversight and respect my constitutional rights as a citizen. And which watchdog is ensuring this exactly? hint: It's not the politicians...
andrewstuart2 9y ago
From the NSA, and my admittedly-limited understanding of their duties, I'd expect honesty but not full openness. I'd rather you never tell me anything than be mislead. It's a trust thing. Lying might boost trust temporarily but when I realize it's a lie, it's gonna be lower than before.

volkk 9y ago

Sort of a catch 22 there, right? You expect integrity, but without honesty/openness, how do you hold them to it?

dsjoerg 9y ago
You elect representatives and executives who are given security clearances and the right to great transparency and openness. When or if those elected officials are found to have abused the public trust, you punish them, their associates and their successors at the ballot box and in the court of public opinion. It's not a great process but I don't see a better way for a democracy to have an internationally competitive intelligence apparatus. And without such an apparatus we are exposed to attacks on our democratic integrity, military effectiveness, deliberative privacy and much more.
- vthallam 9y ago
  That'd work in an ideal world, not here. In a 2 party system which are increasingly polarizing you'd have the pressure to stick to the party line.
  - drusepth 9y ago
    Even in our current world, some issues' importance outweighs sticking to the party line. Luckily, we have more than two parties to vote for, so it's not quite as black and white as that.
    - tambienben 9y ago
      >Luckily, we have more than two parties to vote for Not to most americans--especially when it comes time to vote.
      - drusepth 9y ago
        There's a real catch-22: the multiple other parties we (in the US) are capable of voting for will never have a chance at winning if we don't treat them as real alternatives to the entrenched two. There's a reason both D's and R's repeat the lines "voting for a third party is a wasted vote" and play the polarizing "if you vote third party, you're voting for <opposite party>" card each election season. It may be partially true at the time, but also implies there are only two parties that can actually win -- which is something that can easily change, especially as D's and R's both move further towards the end of their respective spectrums.
        mraler 9y ago
        I think the key is to vote third (alternative?) party in smaller elections (mayor, state senate), and then work up. Voting third party for congress is mostly a waste of time for now, and it doesn't seem likely that we're going to see a massive enough shift in voter participation to change that all in one go, but I think with enough effort to build up non-D/R party support at the local level that could change a lot faster than most people think. I'm less optimistic about the presidency, really. I doubt the reigning parties will let that slip out of their hands.
- zipwitch 9y ago
  We are currently paying the costs (both monetary and otherwise) for the apparatus you describe, but looking at the last decade, the benefits appear to be absent. Perhaps we need to consider the possibility that an organization like the NSA just isn't worth having?
  - drusepth 9y ago
    By nature of the secrecy required by how the NSA operates, many of the benefits would likewise not be made public (to avoid sharing unnecessary information on how they operate), so I'm not entirely sure it's fair for any of us out of the know to weigh the benefits versus the costs in this way. Our elected members privy to the actual costs and the actual benefits should be the ones making the decision on whether the NSA is worth having or not.
  - bradyd 9y ago
    In fact organizations like the CIA and NSA are more of a threat to the American people than the people they are supposedly protecting us from.
    - williamdclt 9y ago
      Not necessarily disagreeing but: facts? numbers? source?
    - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
      I suspect it's like inoculation: some people die from inoculations, but on the whole the herd gains valuable protection. The TLA may be terrible for particular individuals, or small groups with a shared characteristic, but politicians should nonetheless advocate for them to protect the "way of life of citizens". It's a "do you keep a guard dog that you know might maul a child" type of question.
  - willstrafach 9y ago
    Your comment shows why some more open-ness would be great for everyone. Working in secret means nobody will know of the genuine successes, only the allegedly problematic aspects which leak out. It might not be simple, but I am sure that it would be possible to remove classified details from certain “wins” (whether counterterror, counterproliferation, or other) and let the public know what their tax dollars are going toward.
- volkk 9y ago
  Sure, that's sort of what I meant in terms of openness. I don't expect them to leak their secrets in some public memorandum, but I expect them to be fully transparent with the representatives that we elect. However, the question is--are the representatives doing the best job representing us given this sensitive information they're privy to? Who's to say the NSA isn't asking, "just write that we're doing well in this report, its for the better of this country long term." And how do we catch/stop this?
  - aeorgnoieang 9y ago
    This may be the most extreme version of the principle-agent problem. Without leaking or sharing at least some information, it's impossible for the public to hold them accountable. This seems like a fundamental impossibility; not just a matter of the 'wrong' people being privy to the same secrets. For one reason, there's no way we can know if our representatives are even privy to all the information to which they're entitled. Hell, even with a lot of information being leaked it still seems basically impossible to hold them accountable!
  - willstrafach 9y ago
    The HPSCI and SSCI do seem like reasonable checks. Ron Wyden especially has a good track record of calling out things he sees as problematic.
- merpnderp 9y ago
  James Clapper lies to senate intelligence committee and is outed only days later. On March 13th the statue of limitations runs out on prosecuting this crime. This data is misused and no one is punished, even for the overtly blatant crimes.
  - cmurf 9y ago
    This is specious, and exposes deep naiveté about the law as well as protocol at hearings. The director was put into the position of either lying to Congress or disclosing state secrets. Insofar as the law is concerned, exposing state secrets is a far worse offense. That's just the way it works, and if you don't like it, this particular instance isn't the moment to get into a pissing contest about what public policies you don't like, and all the dumb secrets the government keeps from us, but insists we keep on paying for. You should have been more proactive a long time before this, because this moment was being set up over a decade before it happened in public. Clapper lying is an inevitable outcome of a hyper-survellience state, which is an inevitable outcome of a servile and paranoid society. The senator should not have asked the question in an open session if the idea was to get an honest answer. If you're a senator on the intel committee, you ask this sort of question in an open session if you're trying to make a public case that we have too many secrets. And that's exactly what that whole sequence exposes, but per usual, someone from the ignorant mass wants to hang a single person out to dry for the decisions society has made.
    - merpnderp 9y ago
      Ignorant? You mean like the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is supposed to have classified oversight of America's spy agencies? Maybe you should bone up on the details yourself, before slandering others as ignorant. Never mind Clapper could have simply refused to answer the question. But yes, please continue to cover for spies dodging their legal responsibility to comply with full Congressional oversight.
- roywiggins 9y ago
  Another option is, in addition to trustworthy elected officials, you can have some sort of independent oversight that isn't partisan and is independent of whoever is in charge of the executive. The UK has something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Reviewer_of_Terrorism_Legislation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Reviewer_of_Terror...
NegativeLatency 9y ago
Ideally congress would provide oversight. Unfortunately in today's world members of congress seem to be ok with the continued overreach of surveillance.
- PeterisP 9y ago
  Isn't congress the set of people who are literally given the right (and responsibility) to define, by passing laws, what is ok and what's not? If they consider that it's ok, then it's ok; that's how the democratically elected representatives have decided.
drusepth 9y ago
I expect the oversight they are subject to that is also privy to their private actions to hold them to it. I'm curious about what all they do, but at best all I could do is complain on social media about it (which some people actually think is the best approach here). I mean, what else can someone actually do? There can easily be honesty and integrity without openness to everyone.
PeterisP 9y ago
You'd expect them to be open and honest to the officials who are managing and reviewing them, but opaque and occasionally intentionally misleading to the wider general public.

equalunique 9y ago

>However they damn well better submit to oversight James Clapper lied to the Senate intelligence committee about the existence of NSA bulk data collection. Infuriating.

dopamean 9y ago
I'm normally not in the business of defending government agencies but wasn't that interview done in an open forum? Perhaps he would have been more honest if the information wasn't going to be immediately reported on in the media.
- merpnderp 9y ago
  He was testifying in front of Congress. Perjury is what he did. He later waffled about not being able to answer truthfully because of the surveillance being classified - yet he answered.
  - gizmo385 9y ago
    I'm legitimately curious here: Is it possible that he submitted additional testimony after the fact to the committee that he was testifying before? Or discussed the issue in a closed setting where classified material could be discussed?
    - dopamean 9y ago
      I'm wondering the same thing. It seems to me that people who have classified information that shouldn't be released to the public shouldn't be put in a position to have to lie about it under oath.

jessriedel 9y ago

That argument works better for openness than honesty. How often do they need to outright lie to citizens to protect national security?

dfsegoat 9y ago

If history is any judge, as I recall from several recent reads on NSA post-Snowden / Stuxnet etc: Even the most outspoken critic of the NSA (I want to say it was a State attorney or something) was quick to reverse his critiques when he was granted control of an oversight investigation - he was actually shocked at the amount of integrity and openness that he found WITHIN the organization. Doesn't mean it is visible to others. I'll try to find the references.

jackhack 9y ago
I wonder how much blackmail material he was shown just before he dramatically reversed his opinion. I am very cynical. But then a long chain of recorded history rewards my point of view.
- not_kurt_godel 9y ago
  I wonder how many PR bots the NSA has on sites like Hacker News.
  - moftz 9y ago
    They are a government agency with a nearly endless supply of money granted to them by Congress every year without fail. They don't need to do PR for anyone except to gain more employees.
    - not_kurt_godel 9y ago
      > They don't need to do PR for anyone except to gain more employees. Which is exactly why I implied they would be primarily doing PR on sites with high concentrations of people with the skillsets they need...such as Hacker News. This would help them both directly - individuals seeing good PR and thinking "hey, I could work there" - and indirectly by way of combating the general negative perceptions of the NSA in the tech community since the Snowden leaks.
    - mistermann 9y ago

chimen 9y ago

How do you know they are acting with integrity without them being honest or open? It looks like a free ticket to do whatever they like and play the "trust us to be defending national interests" card whenever they see fit.

olfactory 9y ago
This is correct. Honesty would entail being honest with congress or with those who have been authorized to have appropriate clearance. So removing it as a core value reveals that the agency views its mission as having situations where it would reasonably veer away from such honesty.
tw04 9y ago
That's the importance of a free press. If they are violating our constitutional rights, the press should (ethically) be reporting on those violations. See: Edward Snowden. Now, it is our representatives jobs to protect whistle blowers like Snowden, and unfortunately the general public either doesn't care, or doesn't want to take the time to truly understand what it means to have our privacy violated.

devoply 9y ago

> However they damn well better submit to oversight and respect my constitutional rights as a citizen. And which watchdog is ensuring this exactly? hint: It's not the politicians...

andrewstuart2 9y ago

From the NSA, and my admittedly-limited understanding of their duties, I'd expect honesty but not full openness. I'd rather you never tell me anything than be mislead. It's a trust thing. Lying might boost trust temporarily but when I realize it's a lie, it's gonna be lower than before.