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Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated
- spoiledtechie 13y agoI hate how the US Government says things after the fact that we have seen many lies come from them over the past 6 months. Seriously, what do they expect? For us to start believing them right away?
- powertower 13y agoYou're getting the word "fact" in your sentance confused with the word "speculation". They are not the same thing.
- spoiledtechie 13y agoFact. NSA has been spying on all Americans without their knowledge for years.
- powertower 13y ago...and now that the real facts are not fitting your narrative, you're starting to contradict and deny those facts using every emotional response and every fallacy you can think of.
- nitrogen 13y agoWhat are those "real facts"? The Verizon Business court order alone is damaging enough.
- saraid216 13y agoWhat do you mean "without their knowledge"? You didn't know?
- Karunamon 13y agoKnowing that the NSA "watches a bunch of people" is a far sight different from knowing the NSA is watching you personally.
- saraid216 13y agoEh, I guess you guys are just more optimistic than I. I've pretty much assumed for years that anything I type or say is recorded. NSA, black hat, script kiddie, whatever.
- dinkumthinkum 13y agoWhat I don't understand, especially with the constant barrage of posts on HN about this topic ... Were you all really unaware the NSA did things like this or PRISM? I mean really? You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to be this naive. I find the shock and indignation over this news a little over the top. I'm not defending it or anything and I'm not saying it is not an important issue ... but really you never knew or suspected this before? I find it hard to believe any intelligent person would not be surprised to find out the NSA was NOT "spying" on citizens.
- downandout 13y agoYes, because they couldn't possibly have just made up a document saying a random, small number of people were "closely scrutinized". It's also a little odd that a document describing the allegedly tiny reach of still-classified programs is somehow unclassified. This doesn't sound like it was designed for the public at all.
- sigzero 13y agoThe key word there is "closely".
- Zigurd 13y ago#leastuntruthful
- ISL 13y agoBut how many phone numbers do they have the capacity to closely scrutinize?
- nano111 13y agoSoon, they will apparently add yottabytes of storage with their Utah's data center (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center).. that doesn't say how much they can analyze but probably many more then 300.. (1 yottabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000GB)
- danso 13y ago300 people of interest seems reasonable to me...but that number must not include all the first-degree and second-degree contacts that each person-of-interest has...if you saw that Alice was talking to Bob and Carla and suspected Alice to be a terrorist, why wouldn't you also follow the rabbit holes of Bob's and Carla's records? And when do you know to stop? In this way, unhindered surveillance is a lot like torture...sure, you may think it's perfectly justified when you just know that Alice is a bad person. But when the dragnet brings in many non-guilty people, it's not just about whether it's ethical to torture/warantlessly-spy on someone (guilty or innocent), it's also about whether you're actually accomplishing anything by bringing in all this irrelevant noise. So that's why 300 closely-inspected people (plus their network, but to a limited degree) seems reasonable...the NSA has finite resources and finite analysts and can only conjure up finite investigations. Call me naive, but I think it's possible that a good chunk of NSA staffers believe their main role is to protect the nation from evil threats...(just like most military staff joined for the "good of country", initially) and if any of them are half-wise, they'd probably realize that wantonly spying for the hell of it doesn't get them promotions nor serves their country...the NSA is still a bureaucracy, after all. Of course, that doesn't mean that the NSA won't evolve the technology to the point that thoroughly analyzing someone's network and extended network is trivial...and, that all the good-hearted idealists who work for them don't see the true nature of their work, due to the layer of technology and bureaucracy...but...we know of the current controversy because Snowden was able to walk out undetected with the files in a USB drive. So we're not there yet, so hence, it's possible this report is legit.
- ihsw 13y agoOne has to wonder how they'll define data-mining for the purposes of (for example) credit fraud or insurance fraud, and whether that qualifies as "closely" scrutinized. There are a myriad of other questionable uses that could come from their data set of everything that don't require "close" scrutiny. Just like how quickly DNS-based website blocking expanded beyond simple and straight-froward "think of the children" child-pornography hunting turns into "decency" enforcement, this NSA data warehousing program could quickly turn unpleasant.
- Uchikoma 13y agoYou can write all phone conversations to storage and still only closely scrutinize 300 numbers.
- motters 13y agoIt's a bit like saying that they're going to install cameras linked to a spy agency into every home, but don't worry because only a few homes will be scrutinised closely.
- swombat 13y agoThat's nice. The rest are only recorded for posterity, but not "closely scrutinized", right?
- Brushfire 13y agoThis is pretty amusing, but they've just made a classic apologists mistake. Either they need all this access and funding to surveil a large number of dangerous people, or they dont need either to surveil such a small number of people. If it only resulted in 300 phone numbers to track, then sure, maybe the privacy violations weren't as bad (hypothetically). But that argument then puts the whole program at a ridiculous cost to threat ratio, and should be shutdown because it isn't effective at all and is a waste of taxpayer money. Lose, Lose NSA - You're either violating our liberties or wasting our money.
- mpyne 13y agoAre you saying that the U.S. has more than ~300 people overseas actively working on terror plots at any given time? You can't represent cost:threat ratio as dollars per person tracked. The major reason for why the program exists is to detect and break-up one-off major terrorist plots so even if the NSA was detecting all worldwide terror plans against the U.S. the number of people they were tracking would never be very high. This is what all the people saying that the risk of dying from terrorism is so completely low have been reminding us, remember?
- comefrom10 13y agoPerhaps if the US government wants to protect us from terrorism it should stop acting like a terrorist organization abroad.
- mpyne 13y agoWhat was the excuse for 9/11 then? I seem to recall it was nothing more "terroristic" than having U.S. forces deployed in Saudi Arabia, at the request of that nation. But let me guess, victim blaming is OK, as long as the victims are Americans?
- comefrom10 13y agoI didn't blame victims in that post. Perhaps I should be more certain about what the US is doing abroad before saying what I said, but I have gotten the impression that the US government's track record has been less than stellar, e.g. Operation Ajax.
- uptown 13y agoIf you look at the growth of the no-fly list, 300 sounds like an implausibly low number considering the likelihood of adding-to-the-list whoever is on the receiving end of each call. No Fly List Statistics: In mid-December 2001, two lists were created: the "No Fly List" of 594 people to be denied air transport, and the "Selectee" list of 365 people who were to be more carefully searched at airports. By December 2002, the No Fly List held more than 1,000 names. 60 Minutes reported on 8 October 2006 that the news program had obtained a March 2006 copy of the list that contained 44,000 names. TSA officials said that, as of November 2005, 30,000 people in 2005 had complained that their names were matched to a name on the list via the name matching software used by airlines. In April 2007, the United States government "terrorist watch list" administered by the Terrorist Screening Center, which is managed principally by the FBI, contained 700,000 records. A year later, the ACLU estimated the list to have grown to over 1,000,000 names and to be continually expanding. However, according to Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff, in October 2008 the No Fly list contained only 2,500 names, with an additional 16,000 "selectees", who "represent a less specific security threat and receive extra scrutiny, but are allowed to fly." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List
- mpyne 13y agoI don't know, maybe something happened around the 2008-2009 timeframe to cause the executive agency to start changing the policies regarding the usefulness of lists with millions of names on it... can't quite put my finger on what that change might have been though.
- uptown 13y agoI wish somebody would ask whether computer-transcribed conversations are considered to have been "listened to".
- brown9-2 13y agoWhere is the title stated in the linked article?
- EthanHeilman 13y agoI am reminded for an episode of The Simpsons in which Bart changes his grade from 'F' to an 'A+'. Homer: [incredulously] A-plus?!? You don't think much of me, do you boy? Bart: [almost proudly] No sir! Homer: You know a D turns into a B so easily. You just got greedy. 300 phone numbers is a such low number it is completely unbelievable. I would expect a intelligence agency would be better at telling convincing lies, but I guess they don't think much of us. For future reference I might believe somewhere in the range of 15,000 to 50 million. Also 300 is a surprisingly round number.
- cpleppert 13y ago>>300 is a surprisingly round number. "[l]ast year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records gathered daily by the NSA" >>For future reference I might believe somewhere in the range of 15,000 to 50 million You think that there are at least 15,000 terrorists/foreign targets of interest that would have any reason to call a US number?
- stfu 13y agoObviously not the OP but I would give a definite yes to the second question, esp. considering what qualifies as a "terrorist" these days. Let's take the Boston Bombers and make a low balling guess that each one of them has called 20 unique numbers in the last 6 month, each of which have in turn again called 20 unique numbers and we are already at 800 numbers under surveillance.
- EthanHeilman 13y agoNSA does drug busts, industrial espionage, and political work for many other TLAs. For instance we know some details about the MINARET project which was not the full extent of their spying that: "Operating between 1967 and 1973, over 5,925 foreigners and 1,690 organizations and US citizens were included on the Project MINARET watch lists. NSA Director, Lew Allen, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975 that the NSA had issued over 3,900 reports on the watch-listed Americans." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MINARET http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MINARET One imagines that with the growth of technology and the growth of the NSAs budget from that time they are able to distractedly increase those numbers.
- JacksonGariety 13y ago> "As everybody who has been associated with the program's said if we had this before 9/11, when there were two terrorists in San Diego - two hijackers - able to use that program, that capability against the target, we might have been able to prevent 9/11" These politicians believe it's worth invading everyone's privacy in order to prevent an attack on American soil. That's insane. A surveillance state is far more of a danger to people than terrorism.
- ahallock 13y agoI would say surveillance at this level is almost a form of terrorism. I don't not feel safe using phone and web applications. I'm also fearful to post libertarian-leaning comments or comments that could be deemed "anti-government" for fear of being targeted in the future. It may be irrational and slightly paranoid, but I think history has shown us not to trust people with extraordinary power like this.
- mindcrime 13y agoWell, I'm still overtly anti-government, anti-NSA, pro voluntaryist, pro market-anarchism, pro libertarian, pro anarcho-capitalism, etc. If they're listening to this conversion, well... fuck it, I refuse to be censored. The worst they can really do is kill me. shrug I wasn't planning to live forever anyway.
- zt 13y agoOddly, the Reuters article and headline changed (and then the moderators appropriately changed the HN headline). That's also why so many of the comments below, particularly those referencing the 300 number, don't make much sense. Here is the lede of the originally linked article: U.S. spy agency paper says fewer than 300 phone numbers closely scrutinized WASHINGTON, June 15 (Reuters) - The U.S. government only searched for detailed information on calls involving fewer than 300 specific phone numbers among the millions of raw phone records collected by the National Security Agency in 2012, according to a government paper obtained by Reuters on Saturday. The unclassified paper was circulated Saturday within the government by U.S. intelligence agencies and apparently is an attempt by spy agencies and the Obama administration to rebut accusations that it overreached in investigating potential militant plots. The administration has said that even though the NSA, according to top-secret documents made public by former agency contractor Edward Snowden, collects massive amounts of data on message traffic from both U.S. based telephone and internet companies, such data collection is legal, subject to tight controls and does not intrude on the privacy of ordinary Americans.
- jorg 13y agoI'm a little offended that as a non American, this invasion of my privacy is apperantly a non issue.