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U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism
- EGreg 7y agoSurveillance is easy when all our communications are going through centralized services. Just another side effect of centralization.
- forgotmypw 7y agoAs designed.
- bronlund 7y agoPresent the threat. Present the solution. Rinse. Repeat.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- momentmaker 7y ago"Two reasons why people do stuff - one that sounds good and the real reason." - JP Morgan
- ninly 7y agohttps://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/26/two-reasons/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/26/two-reasons/
- dmix 7y agoTBH after reading that it still sounds like JP Morgan or Roosevelt is a safe attribution choice there. The particular structure of the sentence combined with "commonly used by" or "made popular by", etc is sufficient IMO. Quote sourcing is always a bit vague. Or maybe just saying "as the commonly used phrase goes" is better.
- ninly 7y agoI don't entirely disagree, but I feel like quotations are so often used in discourse without any context, and with a problematic sort of "pure" attribution to the genius of the person quoted. Quotations from Einstein or Lincoln are frequent examples of this, even where the quote is not misattributed. Of course, blatant misattribution is also so dang common that it seems better to me in general to cite some kind of context or whatever. Plus (for me, a prior editor) use of quote marks typically implies verbatim, citable quotation, so that's a factor whether the attribution is "safe", as you suggest. Not to criticize anything here at all; I just wanted to throw in some of that sweet sweet context!
- datashow 7y ago> "U.S. surveillance laws failed to counter terrorism" > "The patchwork of U.S. surveillance laws has proven ineffective at countering terrorism" Where is the proof? I can not find it in the article.
- jxramos 7y agoI thought there was a list of this sort of counter terrorism successes, apparently there is... 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...
- manicdee 7y agoNow go through them and weed out the plots that were actually sting operations where all the motivation, allies, funding and training came from three letter agencies in a million dollar operation to trick an angry young Muslim man into building a bomb instead of just graffitiing walls with ACAB.
- LMYahooTFY 7y agoI recall reading stories reporting that this was happening not long after 9/11. Do you have any other links to share?
- ta999999171 7y agoThe Intercept is a good source for these stories. Just add their domain/site name to your search queries.
- dx87 7y agoIntel work is like IT; if you're doing it right, nobody knows you're doing anything at all.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- thrillgore 7y agoPerhaps the surveillance state was never meant to stop terrorists, but to trap innocents into an inescapable dragnet.
- jorblumesea 7y agoHow can you prove that clandestine operations do or do not help? If it goes well, no one will ever know. If it fails, it's either covered up or is a huge scandal. It seems contrary to the entire idea of cover intelligence to claim success or failure.
- ameister14 7y agoWhen the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence says they aren't really effective
- dfxm12 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States#Recent_trends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States... This article links to a report that gives a number for terror incidents and how many were foiled. You can see a map here: https://www.typeinvestigations.org/domesticterror/ https://www.typeinvestigations.org/domesticterror/ which talks about the incident, and in the case of foiled incidents, links to something like court proceedings. This doesn't necessarily show clandestine operations led to foiling them vs regular police work, though...
- ethanbond 7y ago> Most of the Islamist incidents are thwarted plots, indicating a significant investment of law enforcement resources. Most of the others are successful acts in which attackers damaged property or inflicted human casualties. Seems to say that surveillance does work, but that we're perhaps surveilling the wrong people/in the wrong proportions. It could be consequence of homegrown terrorism being, errr, homegrown, which therefore entails the much more legally tricky surveillance of American citizens. Islamic terrorism tends to be funded/trained/orchestrated abroad, where collaborators don't enjoy the same freedoms from surveillance.
- jorblumesea 7y agoThose are publicly known cases and just normal counter terrorism investigations. This isn't applicable to clandestine US surveillance as seen in the FISA courts. FISA courts very much fall into "US surveillance" law but are kept secret.
- president 7y agoI'm not sure what the alternative is. Without some form of surveillance, you're never going to catch terrorists or other bad actors. You do, however, need to make sure there are strong checks and balances in place to ensure that people don't use it for nefarious purposes or for personal gain.
- mtgx 7y agoYes, the point of the article is that there are very few if any checks and balances. If you support anything but paying lip service to checks and balances then you would support restricting US government's surveillance powers and requiring a warrant in many more instances than it is required today (almost never when it comes to the NSA, and now the FBI and other agencies can warrantless look at your data before going to court, too, thanks to the latest FISA extension).
- alexfromapex 7y agoIt can be done, the intelligence agencies just need to find new ways to identify terrorists or prevent terrorists from causing harm.
- 54thr 7y agoWhat if the terrorists were intelligence agencies? How would we stop them?
- Razengan 7y agoReally? It doesn't even occur to you to address the issues that create "terrorists?"
- mpiedrav 7y agoReasons behind the kind of terrorism for which mass surveillance is enforced (e.g., Muslim fundamentalists against American interests) have deep historical roots, too messy to be addressed. Britain and France had geopolitical and business interests in the Middle East since the 18-19th century. America since the 20th, when oil suddenly had all the spotlight. Fundamentalists are convinced that "the West" is the Devil on Earth. No political force can pacify fundamentalists nor avoid future generations.
- mtgx 7y agoAbout EO 12333: > They stipulate that any evidence of an American committing a crime that is found incidentally in the course of foreign intelligence operations must be shared with the Justice Department. Furthermore, they permit analysts to use metadata (logs revealing who contacted whom and when they did so) to investigate unknown associates of targeted suspects. And I thought FISA section 702 was bad. I don't think long-time surveillance laws fighter Senator Ron Wyden has ever mentioned in public that EO 12333 was also capable of backdoor searches on Americans, just that FISA 702 would enable that. But it sounds to me like both of them enable backdoor searches on Americans and fishing expeditions. Seriously, how is the NSA dragnet finding crimes Americans are committing and then alerting law enforcement about it not a fishing expedition? Isn't that supposed to be unconstitutional?
- livueta 7y ago> The Privacy Issue is brought to you by the team behind IVPN. Get to know IVPN’s mission and download the app to browse privately and securely. Ugh. It's a fine article, but I worry the VPN industry's constant mis-selling of services under the banner of privacy will eventually taint the message.
- anarchodev 7y agoWhat is the mis-selling exactly? Doesn't seem to me that they're saying using their VPN will make you impenetrable to dedicated actors with nation-state resources. VPNs do help maintain one small level of privacy (namely from your ISP), and if you're using one it's a good bet you'll be interested in other privacy concerns too. There are a lot of VPNs with really bogus claims on their websites but I didn't notice anything appalling about this.
- falcolas 7y agoBetween TLS and DNS over HTTPS, the number of things an ISP can reliably discern from your traffic is becoming vanishingly small. Once the TLS SNI plaintext hole is closed, it becomes smaller still. One can argue that IPs and ports matter, but if all the IPs you visit are in AWS (and their ilk) over 443 (including real time communication protocols), it becomes meaningless.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- danShumway 7y agoI apologize for a somewhat snippy comment, but the idea that VPNS don't really protect against bad ISPs comes up all the time, and it drives me bonkers. > Between TLS and DNS over HTTPS, the number of things an ISP can reliably discern from your traffic is becoming vanishingly small. A) While encryption is commonplace, not everything on the web is encrypted. The most recent stats I can find[0] say that about 3-10% of common web traffic is still not encrypted. If you're browsing more interesting parts of the web (ie, old forums and independent sites, and not just Facebook/CNN) your stats are probably worse. B) Even if all of the websites you visit are fine, a nontrivial portion of native apps also don't use encrypted endpoints, because unlike on the web there were never native warnings or lock icons in a URL bar to force them to make the change. C) Even if the server is using TLS, there are numerous attacks based around measuring packet delivery times and request sizes to figure out exactly which static pages of a domain you're visiting. This is why Linux package managers have widely dismissed HTTPS -- it provides no privacy for their specific use-case, because anyone can figure out what you're downloading just by counting how many bytes get sent to you. D) So you just turn on DNS over HTTPS, right? Sounds good, except pretty much none of your native apps or dedicated devices like game consoles, e-readers, and smart-home appliances support it unless you're handling it on the network level. Even if you are doing DOH on your router, it's not uncommon for dedicated devices to bypass your DNS settings entirely. Even Google is guilty of this, for a long time you could not set a Chromecast to use a custom DNS server. E) Even if you have DNS over HTTPS, you still need to worry about SNI, and encrypted SNI still has relatively low adoption on the web outside of industry-leaders like Cloudflare. ---- But let's assume that none of the above applies to you. You're connecting to a site that's using TLS 1.3 and supports encrypted SNI. You're using DNS over HTTPS. In that scenario, knowing the IP/port of the server you're connecting to can still be good enough to unmask the domain. You do bring up this point, but then you kind of just skip over it. > One can argue that IPs and ports matter, but if all the IPs you visit are in AWS (and their ilk) But they're not. Yes, if every single site I visited had the same IP, I'd be fine leaking that information. But they don't all have the same IP. I visit plenty of sites that are being hosted on independent hardware, on Linode servers, and so on. Servers with unique, static IPs are not uncommon. Not only is this bad advice in the sense that it just isn't true, it's also bad advice because it's tying security/privacy to centralization. We want people to host their own stuff online, we don't want everyone to be on AWS and Google Cloud. We want diversity of hosting. ---- Finally, although I understand you're only talking about ISPs above, it's also worth noting that the point of a VPN is not just to obscure your traffic from your ISP, it's also to obscure your IP address from the sites you visit. That's also an idea that gets regularly dismissed by a vocal subgroup on HN, who are apparently of the opinion that the entire TOR project is just a waste of time because IP addresses don't actually matter. VPNs are not a perfect solution. They're arguably not a even a good solution. But the problem that they're trying to solve does exist. There are reasonable, strong arguments to make against VPNs: that they aren't magic, that they're deceptively marketed, that shifting trust can be problematic. "IP addresses aren't worth protecting", or "DNS is fine already", are not reasonable arguments. [0]: https://transparencyreport.google.com/https/overview https://transparencyreport.google.com/https/overview
- pinkfoot 7y agoI remind readers that the Novichok assasins were identified via CCTV sureillance monitored by Government authorities.
- colejohnson66 7y agoAnd I remind readers that Russia warned us about the Boston Bombers and we ignored them. One success does not equal success at all things.
- pinkfoot 7y agotouché
- dheera 7y agoMost terrorists in the US happen to be white (and really just because it's the majority race), but the media and government fail to use the term "terrorist" if they are white. That in turn results in them being busy racially profiling against colored people and foreign nationals and overlooking a lot of culprits. Also, nobody is born a terrorist. They're overly fixated on catching terrorists instead of preventing terrorism altogether. Domestic crime, including terrorism, is the result of a broken education system. If you want to fix domestic terrorism, fix education, fix mental health, fix life in general for US citizens, and a lot of problems will quite literally magically disappear. - Number of gun deaths in the US in 2019: 15381 - Number of mass shooting incidents in the US in 2019: 434 - Number of deaths actually reported as being due to "terrorists" in the US in 2019: 0
- ftvy 7y agoMost terrorists in the world happen to be brown (and really just because it's the majority race).
- dheera 7y agoThat's probably true. However the US government should really be putting more effort into protecting its own residents at home, in terms of the most likely actual threats. Calling all forms of terror "terror", regardless of the color of the culprit, is probably a good first step.
- homonculus1 7y agoThe City of San Francisco designated the NRA of all groups as a terrorist organization. There are plenty of institutional actors itching to label white terrorism, even past the point of sanity.
- papito 7y agoBut someone like William Barr digs the surveillance state quite a lot. It's the kind of people we had in mind when we created it.
- 54thr 7y agoThe threat of terror gives power to the State. Power seeks more power. The State does not erode freedoms in support of safety. The State erodes freedoms to achieve more power. Terror is the excuse. It is the State's greatest tool.
- BucketSort 7y agoPeople say these types of things, but they don't revolt. Have we reached a point where we are okay with a corrupt government as long as amazon prime ships us our toys within two days? Convenience and comfort seems like it's worth more to people than liberty and a good conscience.
- godelski 7y ago> Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. - Benjamin Franklin
- emptysea 7y agoThere's an interesting NPR interview on the origin of that quote: https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou... tl;dr; Franklin was defending government spending on defense
- godelski 7y agoInteresting read, thanks for that. I'll update the tldr with two quotes > It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it's almost always quoted as saying but much closer to the opposite than to the thing that people think it means. > And maybe it doesn't matter so much what Franklin was actually trying to say because the quotation means so much to us in terms of the tension between government power and individual liberties. But I do think it is worth remembering what he was actually trying to say because the actual context is much more sensitive to the problems of real governance than the flip quotation's use is, often. I think the second quote is important, because sayings change over time and the meaning they hold changes too. That is the progression of language.
- blurps 7y agoGreat informative article, but at times the posing is naive or supporting a certain narrative. For instance: The government goes after Islamic terrorists and Mexican illegal immigrants. So what to complain about? Mix cause and effect to pose the illegal immigrants as targeting based on race. Or pose the extremist religious as vulnerable Muslims, targeted on religion. Remove their status as far away from the cold-hard reality, so you can claim racism and prejudice and use that to cripple surveillance. But the suspect is a "citizen"! All weasel words to stay away from the real dirt. Let's go after the atheists for counter terrorism, so we don't discriminate in the eyes of the ACLU... Then the "ineffective against terrorism"-claim. This can't be supported, because no clear numbers/cases are known. Then conflate laws against terrorism with actual actions against terrorism: Sure, no law directly contributed against countering terrorists, but the surveillance certainly did. Thanks NSA for passing along information to my country many times, so we could capture really dangerous people before they could strike. Anti-terrorism is also a red herring for surveillance efficiency. Surveillance predominantly used for other national security purposes, such as counter intelligence, foreign intelligence, border safety, crime fighting, and even economic espionage. Sure, posing any immigrant as a bad hombre, potential MS-13 gang member, selling your children fentanyl-laced drugs, is ridiculous. But the other side of that same coin is posing bad people as vulnerable undocumented citizens who are being targeted on race. It does not do justice to the situation on the ground.
- baybal2 7y ago> far away from the cold-hard reality The cold-hard reality is that states who have established a system of domestic surveillance have sent millions of their own citizens to crematoriums. Sane nations have destroyed your political faction back in sixties. Pro-communist, race chauvinists who look up to Mao for inspiration were thrown in the garbage bin of history, and thank god for that. Very fortunately, America of today is not Cambodia, nor Laos, and you all have to thank Rockefeller commission for grinding the legacy of Allen Dullest to dust
- blurps 7y agoYou are using the same tactic I described: State surveillance has the potential to turn us all into Nazi's, so state surveillance is inherently bad. How can I ever hope to support the good of state surveillance for national security when I have to defend the Stasi? I can't. You (God)win. It is intellectually dishonest to pose the effort of governments to combat illegal immigration as a targeting of people based on race. It is a sensitivity trap that shuts down our rational faculties. Yes... all religious extremists are also religious. Most immigrants have a different race. Yes, being an undocumented immigrant makes you vulnerable. But deserving of coddling, because they happen to also share a protected variable? No.
- aquadrop 7y agoThe only measure that needed to be done after 9/11, and it's surprising why this very effective measure wasn't implemented before - securing access to the pilot's cabin. Everything else is overreaction cause by power grabbing by "security agencies" and politicians trying to score. The whole security system of today's world (especially in flying) is one pointless thing after another, holding on the a fear of "what if".
- amatecha 7y agoDoesn't help when it's a pilot who wants to crash the plane. Further, that makes it impossible for anyone to intervene in that case.
- dmix 7y agoNor when we give licences and large vans/trucks to people who want to crash them. It's about managing risk and historically most hijackings have been by passengers and there is no significant loss to securing it with passenger jets having two pilots (ie, if one passes out), its win-win. Meanwhile the vast majority of what the TSA and a significant-enough chunk of what security agencies do is pure theater, in exchange for a significant headaches and loss of privacy/dignity/time/etc of citizens who fund and technically support such organizations - and everyone else visiting the country as it deters plenty of tourism and business travel.
- kayfox 7y agoScreening of pilots for various issues, mental and performance wise, has increased substantially since 9/11 as well.
- AWildC182 7y agoFuck no it hasn't... The FAA still systematically pulls medicals for mental health issues rather than allowing treatment. If your livelihood and a couple hundred thousand dollars of debt depend on it, you'll conceal extreme depression just fine. Pilots are terrified of getting help and an absurd proportion of the community is suffering from depression as a result.
- Shivetya 7y agoIs there any country which hasn't had this result? I didn't know anyone who was fond of their own countries efforts.
- mLuby 7y agoGermany seems to be moving in the other direction. I assume they can do this because unlike the US, Germans can point to their own history with secret police and authoritarian states as cautionary tales. Not that other countries couldn't also look to Germany's example, but that would require trans-national empathy so LOLno.
- mLuby 7y agoLaw enforcement, tasked with catching the baddies, always wants more ability to complete their task: more surveillance, more laws, and more firepower. That's as it should be. The problem is the lack of heavy-weight counter-balance, always demanding more privacy, fewer laws, and less firepower. The best we've got is "the status quo" and a few non-profits (that thankfully are punching way above their weight class). Without such a counterbalancing agency, each small gain by law enforcement rarely reverts, so rather than oscillating between a bit too much freedom and a bit too much policing we have an arrow moving us steadily toward a police state.
- jdashg 7y agoDon't forget systemic pressure to make "more baddies"!
- krzepah 7y agoToday we hide behind computers and algorithms to do the "dirty job"
- arminiusreturns 7y agoSurveillance is not about security! It's about control. Security is just how it's sold to the public, the politicians, etc.