6 ms·

NSA Claims Surveillance Programs Aided Stopping Of 50 Attacks; Details Lacking

72 points by peter123 13y ago

jpdoctor 13y ago
I bet we could stop a lot more than 50 attacks if we gut the rest of the fourth amendment too.
- MichaelGG 13y ago
  That doesn't make sense, at least inside the US. If 50 were stopped, to stop a lot more than 50 (what, 100?), would require that many to have actually succeeded or going to succeed. There's no evidence of that.
ianstallings 13y ago
I have 50 pink unicorns in this box. I can't show you because it would compromise their safety. I have them working on a cigarette that stops lung cancer.
- alexqgb 13y ago
  Potentially pink unicorns, to be precise.
throwaway10001 13y ago
NSA Claims Surveillance Programs Aided Stopping Of 50 Attacks; Details Lacking Yeah, I'm the Queen of England. Really, but details are lacking. Sorry NSA but I am not buying it, some megacorp is worried about losing billion dollar checks from FedGov
betterunix 13y ago
DETAILS LACKING is the key phrase here. Were these realistic attacks? Were the attackers being egged on the by the government? Also, am I the only one wondering why the number of attacks that these programs supposedly stopped increases every few days?
- mikeash 13y ago
  Indeed. If there were 50 attacks like 9/11 that were only stopped because of this, I would have to sit back and think real hard about my stance about the fight against terrorism. On the other hand, if it was 50 attacks like the idiots who were going to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge by cutting the support cables with a blowtorch, then the program is obviously not even remotely worthwhile. Of course, the lack of details gives us some details already. If it really was 50 9/11-scale attacks, they would have said so. That they have not said so tells us that these attacks were not important anyway.
- malandrew 13y ago
  also... would the attacks would have been discovered and foiled even if these programs did not exist?
famousactress 13y ago
Watching this play out was painful, but as much as I like the comments about unicorns and being the Queen of England, for a moment let's assume that most or all of the fifty cases were real threats on some level or another, and this information played a role. The problem that I see in the way these questions get asked or answered is in the speculation they leave up to the answerer to interpret. Asking the FBI whether an attack would haven't been thwarted if this tool didn't exist allows the FBI to answer from the imaginary perspective of having no tool at all. I feel like that's what we started seeing this morning. It's a harder, longer conversation (than I suspect congress has patience for) to thoroughly evaluate whether alternative tools could have done the same job. I also feel like we saw a very selective use of speculation. When asked whether this tool would have prevented 9/11 we got [paraphrased, barely] "We'll never know, but I can tell you this tool didn't exist back then". But when asked whether PRISM was essential in thwarting threats, or whether this leak has affected national security ongoing... the speculation was suddenly reasonable.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  >The problem that I see in the way these questions get asked or answered is in the speculation they leave up to the answerer to interpret. It's not an accident, they receive the questions for these public briefings in advance. The questioners receive guidance on what questions they may not ask, and how to ask the ones they can.
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  It is painful, and typically the reasoning for not revealing details is that it will compromise the method used to acquire said details. However that reasoning completely fails when the point of the conversation is that we already know about how the information was acquired, so telling us what it prevented doesn't change the status quo.
  - famousactress 13y ago
    Exactly! If there's a solid argument to be made here, you'd think the silver lining here is that this would provide an opportunity to be forthcoming with evidence of it's value. To be fair, Alexander seemed to think this way when it came to talking about the policy safeguards in place. At one point he was kind of falling all over himself with joy for how certain he thought it was that the American public would be pretty gosh-darned impressed at what a tight ship they're running over there (once they figure out how to release only information that will steer public opinion in that direction).
SkyMarshal 13y ago
I wish somebody would leak the details on this too.
jurassic 13y ago
If you watch the video of Alexander's testimony, he says "potential terrorist events" not attacks. So these could have just been meetings among people with fringe political views. I'm not buying it.
diminoten 13y ago
What set of facts would the NSA be required to show before those who oppose these surveillance measures in general start saying what the NSA has done is reasonable? Is 50 threats stopped that wouldn't have been enough to justify the intrusion of privacy? Would 100? Maybe 1000?
- CWuestefeld 13y ago
  In my book, there's no number. The question assumes that this is all negotiable, that there's some level at which we should be prepared to surrender fundamental freedoms. I claim that no such value exists. Since the primary source of these threats seems to be from militant Islamicists, it would seem that we could get some measure of safety from banning Islam from America. How many thwarted attacks should it take for us to toss out the First Amendment? It's difficult to prove that somebody is conspiring with a terrorist organization. Surely the need to prove a defendant guilty before a jury, is opening the door for terrorist attacks. How many thwarted attacks should we expect before we're willing to discard the Seventh Amendment? Oh, wait, we've already done that one in Guantanamo. Maybe we are on the way...
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    Since the primary source of these threats seems to be from militant Islamicists, it would seem that we could get some measure of safety from banning Islam from America. How many thwarted attacks should it take for us to toss out the First Amendment? Surely you've noticed that there's a small but vocal minority that is heartily in favor of this, along with things like militarizing the border with Mexico, rounding up 1--12 million illegal aliens, and so on.
    - CWuestefeld 13y ago
      Indeed. And I'm comfortable lumping those xenophobes into the same group as those who believe that we should throw out the 4th Amendment, and have already discarded the 7th (and chunks of several others).
spodek 13y ago
How many attacks did they provoke? How many people on the cusp of violent retaliation now feel justified to do what they only thought about before? How many people who wouldn't dislike the U.S. will? How many governments who would partner with the U.S. won't trust the country? How much reason did they give people to hate them? How much did they breach the Constitution and how is that different from anyone else doing it?
- tptacek 13y ago
  None. Look at all politically-motivated violent attacks that deliberately or recklessly affected civilians; all of them were done by people who would be uninfluenced by any detail of due process in the US. No sane person tries to blow up an airplane over NSA surveillance. I think James Clapper should be fired, that we need to reevaluate the FISA court system, and (most radically) that NSA needs to be transitioned back into a foreign intelligence agency and be firewalled off from domestic law enforcement. I don't think we should try to get there by making arguments that 99% of Americans will immediately reject, in part because even people who are sympathetic to the problem of an overreaching NSA will disagree strongly with them.
  - pvnick 13y ago
    >No sane person tries to blow up an airplane You could have stopped there.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      No, I don't think so.
      - pvnick 13y ago
        Oh hey tptacek it looks like you've shifted your opinion on this whole NSA scandal a bit over the past couple days to be less skeptical and more in line with the rest of HN. Was there any particular story that made you change your mind?
shill 13y ago
I'm sure the Stasi prevented a few heinous crimes in its day too.
dopamean 13y ago
I really dont like the idea that because some people may have been saved from death that trampling on peoples rights is ok. How many people died for us to end up with these rights? Thousands? Millions? Tens of millions? So is it ok to dash away 4th amendment rights to save hundreds? Thousands? It just doesn't seem fair to everyone who sacrificed so much before us.
- tsotha 13y ago
  >I really dont like the idea that because some people may have been saved from death that trampling on peoples rights is ok. Isn't that exactly the argument inherent in gun control legislation?
  - dopamean 13y ago
    Yes. I don't like most gun control legislation either. My only belief regarding gun control is that if we want to do it properly we have to repeal the 2nd Amendment.
    - privong 13y ago
      This gets into the issue of where rights originate. Do they originate with the government (or its founding documents) or are they an integral part of being human?
      - dopamean 13y ago
        I don't believe a right to bear arms is an integral part of being human. I think the 2nd Amendment has outlived its usefulness.
        tsotha 13y ago
        >I don't believe a right to bear arms is an integral part of being human. Couldn't disagree more with this. I think the right to self-defense is very much and integral part of being human.
stefap2 13y ago
In the former communist block there was virtually no organized crime, except maybe some small time crime. The secret police had everything under a tight control, screening phone calls, mail etc. Indeed, it was a very safe place to live if you did not stand out from the crowd and did what was expected.
- pilsetnieks 13y ago
  The organized crime in the Soviet block was put away but not eradicated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vor_v_zakone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vor_v_zakone .) Which, of course, resulted in a shitstorm after the collapse of USSR.
silveira 13y ago
"By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away." Lisa Simpson
pasquinelli 13y ago
50 is on the highish side of reasonable, seems like a good choice. still, i would've gone with a bazillion, just to really wow people.
orblivion 13y ago
How many people would have died in 50 years under a totalitarian surveillance state if this information didn't leak?
vijayboyapati 13y ago
"Trust us, we're the US government, what have we ever done to make you wary of that trust?"
gummydude 13y ago
meh, all that data not a preemptive measure against terrorists but to blackmail ppl whenever necessary. I know what u did last summer!!

72 points by peter123 13y ago

jpdoctor 13y ago

I bet we could stop a lot more than 50 attacks if we gut the rest of the fourth amendment too.

MichaelGG 13y ago
That doesn't make sense, at least inside the US. If 50 were stopped, to stop a lot more than 50 (what, 100?), would require that many to have actually succeeded or going to succeed. There's no evidence of that.

ianstallings 13y ago

I have 50 pink unicorns in this box. I can't show you because it would compromise their safety. I have them working on a cigarette that stops lung cancer.

alexqgb 13y ago
Potentially pink unicorns, to be precise.

throwaway10001 13y ago

NSA Claims Surveillance Programs Aided Stopping Of 50 Attacks; Details Lacking Yeah, I'm the Queen of England. Really, but details are lacking. Sorry NSA but I am not buying it, some megacorp is worried about losing billion dollar checks from FedGov

betterunix 13y ago

DETAILS LACKING is the key phrase here. Were these realistic attacks? Were the attackers being egged on the by the government? Also, am I the only one wondering why the number of attacks that these programs supposedly stopped increases every few days?

mikeash 13y ago
Indeed. If there were 50 attacks like 9/11 that were only stopped because of this, I would have to sit back and think real hard about my stance about the fight against terrorism. On the other hand, if it was 50 attacks like the idiots who were going to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge by cutting the support cables with a blowtorch, then the program is obviously not even remotely worthwhile. Of course, the lack of details gives us some details already. If it really was 50 9/11-scale attacks, they would have said so. That they have not said so tells us that these attacks were not important anyway.
malandrew 13y ago
also... would the attacks would have been discovered and foiled even if these programs did not exist?

famousactress 13y ago

Watching this play out was painful, but as much as I like the comments about unicorns and being the Queen of England, for a moment let's assume that most or all of the fifty cases were real threats on some level or another, and this information played a role. The problem that I see in the way these questions get asked or answered is in the speculation they leave up to the answerer to interpret. Asking the FBI whether an attack would haven't been thwarted if this tool didn't exist allows the FBI to answer from the imaginary perspective of having no tool at all. I feel like that's what we started seeing this morning. It's a harder, longer conversation (than I suspect congress has patience for) to thoroughly evaluate whether alternative tools could have done the same job. I also feel like we saw a very selective use of speculation. When asked whether this tool would have prevented 9/11 we got [paraphrased, barely] "We'll never know, but I can tell you this tool didn't exist back then". But when asked whether PRISM was essential in thwarting threats, or whether this leak has affected national security ongoing... the speculation was suddenly reasonable.

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
>The problem that I see in the way these questions get asked or answered is in the speculation they leave up to the answerer to interpret. It's not an accident, they receive the questions for these public briefings in advance. The questioners receive guidance on what questions they may not ask, and how to ask the ones they can.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
It is painful, and typically the reasoning for not revealing details is that it will compromise the method used to acquire said details. However that reasoning completely fails when the point of the conversation is that we already know about how the information was acquired, so telling us what it prevented doesn't change the status quo.
- famousactress 13y ago
  Exactly! If there's a solid argument to be made here, you'd think the silver lining here is that this would provide an opportunity to be forthcoming with evidence of it's value. To be fair, Alexander seemed to think this way when it came to talking about the policy safeguards in place. At one point he was kind of falling all over himself with joy for how certain he thought it was that the American public would be pretty gosh-darned impressed at what a tight ship they're running over there (once they figure out how to release only information that will steer public opinion in that direction).

SkyMarshal 13y ago

I wish somebody would leak the details on this too.

jurassic 13y ago

If you watch the video of Alexander's testimony, he says "potential terrorist events" not attacks. So these could have just been meetings among people with fringe political views. I'm not buying it.

diminoten 13y ago

What set of facts would the NSA be required to show before those who oppose these surveillance measures in general start saying what the NSA has done is reasonable? Is 50 threats stopped that wouldn't have been enough to justify the intrusion of privacy? Would 100? Maybe 1000?

CWuestefeld 13y ago
In my book, there's no number. The question assumes that this is all negotiable, that there's some level at which we should be prepared to surrender fundamental freedoms. I claim that no such value exists. Since the primary source of these threats seems to be from militant Islamicists, it would seem that we could get some measure of safety from banning Islam from America. How many thwarted attacks should it take for us to toss out the First Amendment? It's difficult to prove that somebody is conspiring with a terrorist organization. Surely the need to prove a defendant guilty before a jury, is opening the door for terrorist attacks. How many thwarted attacks should we expect before we're willing to discard the Seventh Amendment? Oh, wait, we've already done that one in Guantanamo. Maybe we are on the way...
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  Since the primary source of these threats seems to be from militant Islamicists, it would seem that we could get some measure of safety from banning Islam from America. How many thwarted attacks should it take for us to toss out the First Amendment? Surely you've noticed that there's a small but vocal minority that is heartily in favor of this, along with things like militarizing the border with Mexico, rounding up 1--12 million illegal aliens, and so on.
  - CWuestefeld 13y ago
    Indeed. And I'm comfortable lumping those xenophobes into the same group as those who believe that we should throw out the 4th Amendment, and have already discarded the 7th (and chunks of several others).

spodek 13y ago

How many attacks did they provoke? How many people on the cusp of violent retaliation now feel justified to do what they only thought about before? How many people who wouldn't dislike the U.S. will? How many governments who would partner with the U.S. won't trust the country? How much reason did they give people to hate them? How much did they breach the Constitution and how is that different from anyone else doing it?

tptacek 13y ago
None. Look at all politically-motivated violent attacks that deliberately or recklessly affected civilians; all of them were done by people who would be uninfluenced by any detail of due process in the US. No sane person tries to blow up an airplane over NSA surveillance. I think James Clapper should be fired, that we need to reevaluate the FISA court system, and (most radically) that NSA needs to be transitioned back into a foreign intelligence agency and be firewalled off from domestic law enforcement. I don't think we should try to get there by making arguments that 99% of Americans will immediately reject, in part because even people who are sympathetic to the problem of an overreaching NSA will disagree strongly with them.
- pvnick 13y ago
  >No sane person tries to blow up an airplane You could have stopped there.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    No, I don't think so.
    - pvnick 13y ago
      Oh hey tptacek it looks like you've shifted your opinion on this whole NSA scandal a bit over the past couple days to be less skeptical and more in line with the rest of HN. Was there any particular story that made you change your mind?

shill 13y ago

I'm sure the Stasi prevented a few heinous crimes in its day too.

dopamean 13y ago

I really dont like the idea that because some people may have been saved from death that trampling on peoples rights is ok. How many people died for us to end up with these rights? Thousands? Millions? Tens of millions? So is it ok to dash away 4th amendment rights to save hundreds? Thousands? It just doesn't seem fair to everyone who sacrificed so much before us.

tsotha 13y ago
>I really dont like the idea that because some people may have been saved from death that trampling on peoples rights is ok. Isn't that exactly the argument inherent in gun control legislation?
- dopamean 13y ago
  Yes. I don't like most gun control legislation either. My only belief regarding gun control is that if we want to do it properly we have to repeal the 2nd Amendment.
  - privong 13y ago
    This gets into the issue of where rights originate. Do they originate with the government (or its founding documents) or are they an integral part of being human?
    - dopamean 13y ago
      I don't believe a right to bear arms is an integral part of being human. I think the 2nd Amendment has outlived its usefulness.
      - tsotha 13y ago
        >I don't believe a right to bear arms is an integral part of being human. Couldn't disagree more with this. I think the right to self-defense is very much and integral part of being human.

stefap2 13y ago

In the former communist block there was virtually no organized crime, except maybe some small time crime. The secret police had everything under a tight control, screening phone calls, mail etc. Indeed, it was a very safe place to live if you did not stand out from the crowd and did what was expected.

pilsetnieks 13y ago
The organized crime in the Soviet block was put away but not eradicated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vor_v_zakone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vor_v_zakone .) Which, of course, resulted in a shitstorm after the collapse of USSR.

silveira 13y ago

"By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away." Lisa Simpson

pasquinelli 13y ago

50 is on the highish side of reasonable, seems like a good choice. still, i would've gone with a bazillion, just to really wow people.

orblivion 13y ago

How many people would have died in 50 years under a totalitarian surveillance state if this information didn't leak?

vijayboyapati 13y ago

"Trust us, we're the US government, what have we ever done to make you wary of that trust?"

gummydude 13y ago

meh, all that data not a preemptive measure against terrorists but to blackmail ppl whenever necessary. I know what u did last summer!!