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If our elected officials don't reign in the NSA and its peers while they can, they will find themselves the ones being governed. The NSA is supposed to spy onl

by spodek 13y ago

If our elected officials don't reign in the NSA and its peers while they can, they will find themselves the ones being governed. The NSA is supposed to spy only on foreigners, not on domestic targets. It seems to have transformed foreign and domestic to mean outside and inside the NSA. Without accountability elected officials, why would they stop? Our would-be leaders aren't leading. They are being led by their agencies, who are developing more and more power. It would seem the task falls on us to lead our elected officials if we hope to avoid a point of no return of NSA usurping power if we haven't already. Americans have led its leaders to desired outcomes before -- civil rights, for example -- but results took generations and many jobs remain unfinished. Let's hope we have the fortitude on this one.

twoodfin 13y ago
Did you read the article? The entire thing is about all the "whistleblowing" Snowden did on how amazingly good our foreign SIGINT is. Codenames of programs and names of targets in Afghanistan included.
- a3n 13y ago
  > Another former insider worries less about foreign leaders’ sensitivities than the potential danger the sprawling agency poses at home. William E. Binney, a former senior N.S.A. official who has become an outspoken critic, says he has no problem with spying on foreign targets like Brazil’s president or the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. “That’s pretty much what every government does,” he said. “It’s the foundation of diplomacy.” But Mr. Binney said that without new leadership, new laws and top-to-bottom reform, the agency will represent a threat of “turnkey totalitarianism” — the capability to turn its awesome power, now directed mainly against other countries, on the American public. > “I think it’s already starting to happen,” he said. “That’s what we have to stop.”
  - twoodfin 13y ago
    What's your point? Are you arguing this wasn't an article about foreign SIGINT just because of one sentence we've read a thousand other times? There's not a single instance of domestic surveillance in this story, yet immediately the same shopworn comments about the NSA having "transformed foreign and domestic to mean outside and inside the NSA" start hitting hn. There's nothing in the article to support that claim.
nonchalance 13y ago
The difference between this circumstance and the civil rights circumstance is that there is no party that is strictly better off with the NSA limited. African americans are strictly better off when having the right to vote as opposed to not having the right to vote. Same argument applies for women. The terrorist threat argument cannot be ignored, and it's plausible to believe that many threats against american assets are hatched in the US and communicated in the US. Likewise, the privacy argument cannot be ignored. So in this case, we have a classic tradeoff. To put it differently: are you better off dead or with the NSA?
- a3n 13y ago
  > To put it differently: are you better off dead or with the NSA? That assumes the NSA is keeping me alive. I'm not convinced. Also, it's supposed to be the FBI that investigates domestic security and crimes. And whoever's doing it, it's supposed to be specific, not everyone. One might ask, are you better off watched, or Constitutionally free?
  - walshemj 13y ago
    But J Edgar Hoover and the FBI in the past did all the sort of things your worried about the NSA doing but unless Snowden is keeping something really juicy back are not? So you would trust a proven bad actor against one where there is no evidence as yet ?
    - a3n 13y ago
      No, I assume they're dirty too. I'm just pointing out they aren't where they're supposed to be.
- giardini 13y ago
  " it's plausible to believe that many threats against american assets are hatched in the US and communicated in the US." Where's the beef? There is none. If the NSA does not justify it's existence in an open forum then we must dismantle it. And it is not enough to prove that the NSA intercepted an operation; it must be proven that, in the absence of the NSA, the same interception would not have occurred and that consequently something significantly evil would have occurred. There are plenty of other federal, state and local agencies that collect information in a legal and constitutionally-mandated manner and they have proven very effective. "To put it differently: are you better off dead or with the NSA?" Nonsensical scare-mongering.
na85 13y ago
I have zero confidence that this situation will ever be rectified. The American voting public is too disengaged, and there are too many uneducated people, the kind who don't realize that Team America is satire, who will swallow the party line and support the government because "they hate us for our freedoms" and "the terrorists". It'll just keep going, in a spiral of apathetic voters and unaccountable leaders. Eventually, be it decades or centuries, Something Bad™ will happen and the US will collapse in a catastrophic fashion. But it's probably too late to stop the NSA from having an inappropriate level of power.
- mercurial 13y ago
  You're wrong in thinking this is an American problem. It is a Western issue. The European governments so incensed about the NSA spying program have been in bed with the UK's GCHQ [1], doing exactly the same thing on their own citizens. And the colour of the government does not seem to matter: from the left or from the right, they're equally happy to spy on you. And I don't know how to fix that. Politicians will promise this won't happen again, but the fact that it happened in the first place shows they cannot be trusted. Maybe Hacker News should secede and form a nation-state on a paradisiac island? 1: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/01/gchq-europe-spy-agencies-mass-surveillance-snowden http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/01/gchq-europe-s...
  - saraid216 13y ago
    Heh. Western? Because Russia and China and Iran and Saudia Arabia and India are exemplars of trusting their citizens. You don't know how to fix it? Here's a start: stop grouping people into ridiculously large categories like "Westerners" or "politicians" or "terrorists". How do you think this starts?
    - mercurial 13y ago
      The big difference is that authoritarian regimes make no secret of their collecting information. They also do not come with a check-and-balance mechanism precisely supposed to prevent the emergence of the new Stasi we're seeing here. This not a characterization of the people living there, but a simple fact: there are a number prerequisitives in order to avoid this kind of issue. It is unfortunate that there seems to be more of them than you would think.
anigbrowl 13y ago
Well, it's kind of inevitable given how interconnected the world is today. It was a lot simpler to distinguish between foreign and domestic 40, 30, even 20 years ago before cellphones were ubiquitous and when control of bandwidth was in far fewer hands - and even at that, the NSA still worked within the US monitoring things like communications between foreign embassies/consulates. Not only are global communications more intricate, but more people have personal foreign relations thanks to the affordability of travel and the globalization of communication, news, etc. What's happening at the NSA has many analogues in the private sector and is to a large extent driven by technology.
philwelch 13y ago
> If our elected officials don't reign in the NSA and its peers while they can, they will find themselves the ones being governed. It's so cute when people put statements like this in the future tense. Why do you think J. Edgar Hoover was never replaced from the founding of the FBI to his death? How has the CIA gotten away with decades of documented criminal activity? What really happened in Dallas almost 50 years ago?
malandrew 13y ago
If the US government does not scale back on what it's doing and continues its rhetoric of "tu quoque" to justify its actions, it would be awesome to see the rest of the World respond by establishing a NSAO, National Security Agency Observatory, who accepts employees from every country but the United States and whose sole task is to infiltrate and publish every US secret for everyone else to know. They could go farther than just the NSA and extend it to every single employee of the US government and its contractors. Those in the US government pushing for this level of surveillance are never going to scale back until they know exactly what if feels like to be subjected to the same level of surveillance. At the very least extend it as far as every US senator and representative that is pro-surveillance. i.e. if your voting record shows that have voted on bills extending the surveillance state, then you automatically become a target to have everything you and your administration has every said and written captured and published for the rest of the World to read in real time. There is no better way to counteract this than Mutually Assured Transparency. i.e establish a policy of "If you won't allow us to have privacy and secrets, we won't allow you to have them either." At the end of the day, the NSA is never going away without drastic measures that make it's existence a liability for the US instead of an asset. The worst thing the rest of the World can do is take the NSA and the current administration at its word. For example, it recently said that it has stopped tapping Angela Merkel's phone calls and communication, but what proof do we have that it has actually stopped. There is no way to prove that it is no longer happening and the people who say that they've stopped have lied for years on this very topic and still deep down believe what they did was valid, so we really have zero justification for trusting that the surveillance has actually stopped. Even if they did stop, we can reasonably assume that they only did so to the letter but not intent. e.g., how do we know that they aren't still keeping tabs on her by tapping everyone about her, but her. You can still assume a lot about a leader by knowing everything her subordinates are saying and doing. If you are a citizen of one of the country's that have been victim of this spying you should suggest this idea to those representatives of yours that are likely to support a plan like this.

by spodek 13y ago

twoodfin 13y ago

Did you read the article? The entire thing is about all the "whistleblowing" Snowden did on how amazingly good our foreign SIGINT is. Codenames of programs and names of targets in Afghanistan included.

a3n 13y ago
> Another former insider worries less about foreign leaders’ sensitivities than the potential danger the sprawling agency poses at home. William E. Binney, a former senior N.S.A. official who has become an outspoken critic, says he has no problem with spying on foreign targets like Brazil’s president or the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. “That’s pretty much what every government does,” he said. “It’s the foundation of diplomacy.” But Mr. Binney said that without new leadership, new laws and top-to-bottom reform, the agency will represent a threat of “turnkey totalitarianism” — the capability to turn its awesome power, now directed mainly against other countries, on the American public. > “I think it’s already starting to happen,” he said. “That’s what we have to stop.”
- twoodfin 13y ago
  What's your point? Are you arguing this wasn't an article about foreign SIGINT just because of one sentence we've read a thousand other times? There's not a single instance of domestic surveillance in this story, yet immediately the same shopworn comments about the NSA having "transformed foreign and domestic to mean outside and inside the NSA" start hitting hn. There's nothing in the article to support that claim.

nonchalance 13y ago

The difference between this circumstance and the civil rights circumstance is that there is no party that is strictly better off with the NSA limited. African americans are strictly better off when having the right to vote as opposed to not having the right to vote. Same argument applies for women. The terrorist threat argument cannot be ignored, and it's plausible to believe that many threats against american assets are hatched in the US and communicated in the US. Likewise, the privacy argument cannot be ignored. So in this case, we have a classic tradeoff. To put it differently: are you better off dead or with the NSA?

a3n 13y ago
> To put it differently: are you better off dead or with the NSA? That assumes the NSA is keeping me alive. I'm not convinced. Also, it's supposed to be the FBI that investigates domestic security and crimes. And whoever's doing it, it's supposed to be specific, not everyone. One might ask, are you better off watched, or Constitutionally free?
- walshemj 13y ago
  But J Edgar Hoover and the FBI in the past did all the sort of things your worried about the NSA doing but unless Snowden is keeping something really juicy back are not? So you would trust a proven bad actor against one where there is no evidence as yet ?
  - a3n 13y ago
    No, I assume they're dirty too. I'm just pointing out they aren't where they're supposed to be.
giardini 13y ago
" it's plausible to believe that many threats against american assets are hatched in the US and communicated in the US." Where's the beef? There is none. If the NSA does not justify it's existence in an open forum then we must dismantle it. And it is not enough to prove that the NSA intercepted an operation; it must be proven that, in the absence of the NSA, the same interception would not have occurred and that consequently something significantly evil would have occurred. There are plenty of other federal, state and local agencies that collect information in a legal and constitutionally-mandated manner and they have proven very effective. "To put it differently: are you better off dead or with the NSA?" Nonsensical scare-mongering.

na85 13y ago

I have zero confidence that this situation will ever be rectified. The American voting public is too disengaged, and there are too many uneducated people, the kind who don't realize that Team America is satire, who will swallow the party line and support the government because "they hate us for our freedoms" and "the terrorists". It'll just keep going, in a spiral of apathetic voters and unaccountable leaders. Eventually, be it decades or centuries, Something Bad™ will happen and the US will collapse in a catastrophic fashion. But it's probably too late to stop the NSA from having an inappropriate level of power.

mercurial 13y ago
You're wrong in thinking this is an American problem. It is a Western issue. The European governments so incensed about the NSA spying program have been in bed with the UK's GCHQ [1], doing exactly the same thing on their own citizens. And the colour of the government does not seem to matter: from the left or from the right, they're equally happy to spy on you. And I don't know how to fix that. Politicians will promise this won't happen again, but the fact that it happened in the first place shows they cannot be trusted. Maybe Hacker News should secede and form a nation-state on a paradisiac island? 1: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/01/gchq-europe-spy-agencies-mass-surveillance-snowden http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/01/gchq-europe-s...
- saraid216 13y ago
  Heh. Western? Because Russia and China and Iran and Saudia Arabia and India are exemplars of trusting their citizens. You don't know how to fix it? Here's a start: stop grouping people into ridiculously large categories like "Westerners" or "politicians" or "terrorists". How do you think this starts?
  - mercurial 13y ago
    The big difference is that authoritarian regimes make no secret of their collecting information. They also do not come with a check-and-balance mechanism precisely supposed to prevent the emergence of the new Stasi we're seeing here. This not a characterization of the people living there, but a simple fact: there are a number prerequisitives in order to avoid this kind of issue. It is unfortunate that there seems to be more of them than you would think.

anigbrowl 13y ago

Well, it's kind of inevitable given how interconnected the world is today. It was a lot simpler to distinguish between foreign and domestic 40, 30, even 20 years ago before cellphones were ubiquitous and when control of bandwidth was in far fewer hands - and even at that, the NSA still worked within the US monitoring things like communications between foreign embassies/consulates. Not only are global communications more intricate, but more people have personal foreign relations thanks to the affordability of travel and the globalization of communication, news, etc. What's happening at the NSA has many analogues in the private sector and is to a large extent driven by technology.

philwelch 13y ago

> If our elected officials don't reign in the NSA and its peers while they can, they will find themselves the ones being governed. It's so cute when people put statements like this in the future tense. Why do you think J. Edgar Hoover was never replaced from the founding of the FBI to his death? How has the CIA gotten away with decades of documented criminal activity? What really happened in Dallas almost 50 years ago?

malandrew 13y ago

If the US government does not scale back on what it's doing and continues its rhetoric of "tu quoque" to justify its actions, it would be awesome to see the rest of the World respond by establishing a NSAO, National Security Agency Observatory, who accepts employees from every country but the United States and whose sole task is to infiltrate and publish every US secret for everyone else to know. They could go farther than just the NSA and extend it to every single employee of the US government and its contractors. Those in the US government pushing for this level of surveillance are never going to scale back until they know exactly what if feels like to be subjected to the same level of surveillance. At the very least extend it as far as every US senator and representative that is pro-surveillance. i.e. if your voting record shows that have voted on bills extending the surveillance state, then you automatically become a target to have everything you and your administration has every said and written captured and published for the rest of the World to read in real time. There is no better way to counteract this than Mutually Assured Transparency. i.e establish a policy of "If you won't allow us to have privacy and secrets, we won't allow you to have them either." At the end of the day, the NSA is never going away without drastic measures that make it's existence a liability for the US instead of an asset. The worst thing the rest of the World can do is take the NSA and the current administration at its word. For example, it recently said that it has stopped tapping Angela Merkel's phone calls and communication, but what proof do we have that it has actually stopped. There is no way to prove that it is no longer happening and the people who say that they've stopped have lied for years on this very topic and still deep down believe what they did was valid, so we really have zero justification for trusting that the surveillance has actually stopped. Even if they did stop, we can reasonably assume that they only did so to the letter but not intent. e.g., how do we know that they aren't still keeping tabs on her by tapping everyone about her, but her. You can still assume a lot about a leader by knowing everything her subordinates are saying and doing. If you are a citizen of one of the country's that have been victim of this spying you should suggest this idea to those representatives of yours that are likely to support a plan like this.