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Well, I'll have to disagree in full with the points the author is trying to make. "A recent Bloomberg piece points to a 2012 report on terrorism which found th

Well, I'll have to disagree in full with the points the author is trying to make. "A recent Bloomberg piece points to a 2012 report on terrorism which found that most serious terrorists steer clear of the most obvious platforms—major cell networks, Google, Skype, Facebook, etc." The 2012 report cited wasn't some senate oversight committee, a DIRNSA (director NSA) report, or a truly credible intelligence source. It was from the Dutch Intelligence agency, an agency focused on leftist activity vs. right-wing Islamic terrorism. "In 2010, Google estimated that it had indexed just 0.004% of the internet—meaning the vast majority of the web is open for surreptitious message-sending business. Terrorists simply aren't dumb enough to discuss their secret plans over Skype or to email each other confidential information on Gmail." Do you think that it's feasible for terrorists to use couriers/tradecraft to transmit all messages to their group members around the world? If I told you right now to get a message to your cousin in Connecticut within an hour without using Skype/email/phone or anything of the other means listed, could you do it? Let's say you answer that you'll just use steganography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography) to hide the message. How are you going to communicate to your cousin where to look for the message and how to break it down? Armchair intelligence analysis is the same as armchair anything -- you have no basis for what you're talking about except a bunch of redacted reports, news articles, and spy movies. Intelligence analysis is a very straightforward thing, though, which a lot of folks working in tech would be really good at, but articles like this are the equivalent of commenting on the merits of using PHP having never written a line of code in your life. I understand peoples' frustration with what (if true) would be an egregious slight on the public trust. But, is it more likely that the 4+ million security clearance holders are in on some large conspiracy to take away our freedoms, or that a disgruntled worker wanted to watch the world burn a little. Having worked in every facet of the NSA as a linguist/intelligence analyst/programmer/many other things, and CIA contractor for a year, I tend to think the latter, and I'm very vocal about my thoughts on the intelligence community. Read my previous comments if you want to see my thoughts on how the media has been getting it wrong, and what the deal is from the perspective of someone who worked in this community.

jessedhillon 13y ago
Could you give an opinion as to whether or not the PRISM slides were made by a BAH contractor or by an NSA employee? So far we have seen very little in the way of corroboration from Snowden -- I'm inclined to believe that he may have made off with assets from BAH's internal network instead: four slides which look terrible if that's all you know of them.
- bazillion 13y ago
  That's an interesting thought. BAH employees spend on a lot of time on what they call "the beach" while they're waiting for a switch to a new job. A lot of that time is spent on reading/writing training materials. You wouldn't be working with classified documents though, typically. It looked to me more like something some Air Force captain who was looking for a promotion put together. There are all sorts of junk slides floating around like that, which don't necessarily reflect active programs...just proposals to show that the people writing them can think outside the box and whatnot. For obvious reasons, I can't comment on classified things, but I was very knowledgable about things and I had never even heard of PRISM when all this stuff came out. Take that with a grain of salt, though, since there are plenty of compartmented programs.
mpyne 13y ago
> Read my previous comments if you want to see my thoughts on how the media has been getting it wrong, and what the deal is from the perspective of someone who worked in this community. I can't speak for everyone, and I've certainly been doing a lot of Devil's Advocating on behalf of the NSA and the government, but I think people would feel better if there were much more transparency into things like: * Why a given collection technique is useful. * Why that technique can't be replaced by other existing techniques. * Why good policy-based protections cannot be reasonably lifted into the law. * And especially whether there are good technical protections in place to protect these masses of data being collected to ensure they are used only for valid investigations. I.e. there is undoubtedly a policy saying not to mis-use the data; is there any superior technical controls also in place? Because while I'm sure that the vast majority of the 4+ million of you all are upstanding people just trying to do the right thing, we've seen in the past month the damage that just 1 "disgruntled worker" can do...

jessedhillon 13y ago

Could you give an opinion as to whether or not the PRISM slides were made by a BAH contractor or by an NSA employee? So far we have seen very little in the way of corroboration from Snowden -- I'm inclined to believe that he may have made off with assets from BAH's internal network instead: four slides which look terrible if that's all you know of them.

bazillion 13y ago
That's an interesting thought. BAH employees spend on a lot of time on what they call "the beach" while they're waiting for a switch to a new job. A lot of that time is spent on reading/writing training materials. You wouldn't be working with classified documents though, typically. It looked to me more like something some Air Force captain who was looking for a promotion put together. There are all sorts of junk slides floating around like that, which don't necessarily reflect active programs...just proposals to show that the people writing them can think outside the box and whatnot. For obvious reasons, I can't comment on classified things, but I was very knowledgable about things and I had never even heard of PRISM when all this stuff came out. Take that with a grain of salt, though, since there are plenty of compartmented programs.

mpyne 13y ago

> Read my previous comments if you want to see my thoughts on how the media has been getting it wrong, and what the deal is from the perspective of someone who worked in this community. I can't speak for everyone, and I've certainly been doing a lot of Devil's Advocating on behalf of the NSA and the government, but I think people would feel better if there were much more transparency into things like: * Why a given collection technique is useful. * Why that technique can't be replaced by other existing techniques. * Why good policy-based protections cannot be reasonably lifted into the law. * And especially whether there are good technical protections in place to protect these masses of data being collected to ensure they are used only for valid investigations. I.e. there is undoubtedly a policy saying not to mis-use the data; is there any superior technical controls also in place? Because while I'm sure that the vast majority of the 4+ million of you all are upstanding people just trying to do the right thing, we've seen in the past month the damage that just 1 "disgruntled worker" can do...