6 ms·

As much as you might think this is out there, I have a hunch, however stupid it might be that leaks about candidates could in fact come out this way. it might

As much as you might think this is out there, I have a hunch, however stupid it might be that leaks about candidates could in fact come out this way. it might not even be Obamas team leaking. Lets sat a partisan person who works for the NSA wants to destroy a candidate. They could in fact do all the research themselves rather than anyone even close to Obama. I look at one direct example of Herman Cain. How did the press ever get ahold of the fact that he was paying women out? Literally, you could say the women spoke up, but with the NSA, you could say someone who works at the NSA leaked the information just because they didn't like Herman Cain to begin with. Now that's scary. Someone's reputation could be destroyed just by a rogue NSA agent.

pstuart 13y ago
Or let them get elected and blackmail them to toe the line...
- junto 13y ago
  This is my suspicion too. Tail wagging the dog. Obama flip-flopped on FISA [1]. He was blatantly aware of the risks it imposed. The question is why? Did someone pay him a little visit? Did some man in a black suit and dark glasses show him a little manila envelope with unknown contents, that caused him to change his mind? One year ago I would have said this was an insane proposition. Now after Snowden, I'm not that sure. That is what is really scary about the surveillance state. [1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/07/netroots-activi/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/07/netroots-activi/ [2] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2008/jul/14/obamas-wiretapping-flip-flop-yes/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2008/jul/14/...
  - philwelch 13y ago
    Who was the last president to try to stand up against these agencies and what happened to him?
- mtgx 13y ago
  Feinstein comes to mind. Although she's probably doing it for the heck of it. She almost seems to enjoy supporting the surveillance state.
  - pstuart 13y ago
    She throws enough tofu to her constituents to appear liberal (women's and LGBT rights), but is otherwise a DINO.
chatmasta 13y ago
Or, don't pay for sex if you plan on running for office.
- notimetorelax 13y ago
  I think you miss the point, almost anyone can be discredited with enough information and power. Take a look at Russian elections, there were no other viable candidates for a reason.
  - khuey 13y ago
    "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
    - venomsnake 13y ago
      Attribute properly, after all the guy that said it was one of the greatest politicians ever to walk the world and the creator of modern Secret Service type organizations.
    - ZoF 13y ago
      -Cardinal Richelieu King Louis XIII's chief minister Hopefully that saves someone ten precious seconds; I'll never get them back!
- dinkumthinkum 13y ago
  I'm surprised that this seems like an unpopular view.
- chatmasta 13y ago
  Why does the HN mob downvote this, but upvote anything related to transparency? I thought transparency, especially amongst our elected officials, was a good idea? If a candidate for major office pays for sex, does the public have the right to know?
saraid216 13y ago
What I find scary is that we live in a nation where such scandals are capable of ending political careers. Where we even have political careers. Where we think it's okay to be worried about single politicians rather than policy in general, because eliminating a politician is capable of shuttering a policy. Where protecting someone's reputation is a necessary political factor.
- detcader 13y ago
  Political careers don't end. People just stop being "politicians" and start being "consultants" or "board members".
  - saraid216 13y ago
    That's like saying your career as a web developer ended, but at least you're still a web designer at another company in another field. It misses the point that the project you championed for five years because it provided real value to real customers just got scrapped and tossed just to make sure none of your taint is left upon it, and half the people you helped hire in order to make it a high quality product got fired because they didn't spend enough time kissing ass rather than shipping code and you were covering for their occasional, warranted antagonism. I honestly don't give a fuck about politicians' after-careers. You failed to lynch them. Fine. We don't do seppuku in this country. Fine. No, I care, for instance, that Obama had to burn down his entire capacity to move and shake politically just to get a half-assed piece of healthcare reform into effect, and that it very well may have failed if Snowden had happened three years earlier.
    - detcader 13y ago
      I think you missed my point.. also, individual politicians represent their respective districts, I would sure hope that people in a democratic society worry about them
      - harywilke 13y ago
        With current reelection rates over 80% in congress for the last fifty years [1], one wonders if they have any need to represent their districts at all. http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/reelect.php http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/reelect.php
legutierr 13y ago
There is at least one case of character assassination that we can with near certainty attribute to the US surveillance apparatus. Eliot Spitzer was Governor of New York, former AG of New York, famous gadfly of Wall Street, and a top contender before the 2008 election to be Obama's pick for Attorney General, when it was discovered that he was paying prostitutes. The explanation as to how this information was discovered is as follows: he paid for these "services" using a wire transfer to the madam, who had created an "anonymous" corporation to collect payments, as a convenience to her wealthy and famous clients. According to Wikipedia, "The investigation of Spitzer was reportedly initiated after North Fork Bank reported suspicious transactions to the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network as required by the Bank Secrecy Act, which was enhanced by Patriot Act provisions, enacted to combat terrorist activity such as money-laundering." [1] Every bank is required by the Patriot Act to file "Suspicious Activity Reports" regarding certain activity to FinCEN, which reports must be kept secret from the person being reported upon. SARs are typically filed electronically, and then centralized in FinCEN review centers, where patterns are analyzed and information is distributed to law enforcement personnel. Spritzer was being monitored because one of the chief criteria used in determining whether a SAR should be filed is whether an individual being monitored is a "Politically Exposed Person" or PEP (that acronym is actually used actively). [2] In other words, by explicit provision of the Patriot Act and US DoT regulations, all financial activities of politicians must be monitored and reported on in secret by financial institutions. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want the US Attorney General to be someone who frequents call girls. It was Spitzer's own self-destructiveness that created the opportunity for this take down. But you have to ask, if it weren't for his aggressive anti-Wall St. stance, would he have been targeted? Perhaps he wouldn't have been. There are certainly similar transgressions committed by less "problematic" politicians that never leak. For instance, even after the whole Spitzer hullabaloo, we don't know who any of this madam's other clients were, even though it was reported that some were famous politicos. What's most significant here, though, is that we don't need to speculate about how this power can work to the advantage of certain interest groups. In this case, broad-spectrum surveillance may have resulted in Eric Holder becoming AG at the height of the financial crisis, instead of the one man perhaps most qualified by experience and temperament to prosecute financial crimes, Eliot Spitzer. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Spitzer_prostitution_scandal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Spitzer_prostitution_scan... [2] http://www.sowal.com/bb/showthread.php/21466-Unintended-Consequences-Spitzer-caught-by-Patriot-Act http://www.sowal.com/bb/showthread.php/21466-Unintended-Cons...
w_t_payne 13y ago
Given the scale of the surveillance, I am sure that there are more subtle and harder to detect approaches that could be used.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
leoc 13y ago
It doesn't strike me as particularly far out. It's not as if no-one has, say, hired the Mafia to rig the US presidential election for them within living memory.
7765668457 13y ago
So this is how it work for a lone partisan actor in the NSA: 1. Eve, the malicious analyst, wants to tank Herman Cain's campaign. She decides to look for dirt on him. 2. Using XKEYSCORE or another database, she inputs queries to collect his email traffic, and enters his public telephone number for call records. She requests chained results so she can get traffic and call records from his associates as well. 3. Some results show up in her inbox. Before she can read them, her auditor comes to her desk to ask her why she input a U.S. person's name, a likely U.S. person's email address, and a U.S. telephone number that hasn't been annotated as belonging to a foreigner in her justification (which she left blank). Without any good justification, she is escorted from the building and has her clearance revoked. Game over. She is eaten by a grue. She is lucky she didn't target a congressman, because she'd be in violation of policy that requires all congressman targeting to go through DIRNSA. Basically, the only way for this to work would be to get the analyst, auditor, supervisor, and IG to be all radicals in the same political party. And they all have no problem with losing their clearances if they're found out.
- grey-area 13y ago
  That's the theory. Here's the reality: The case began because a woman, a foreign national employed by the U.S. government, told another employee she suspected the man with whom she was in a sexual relationship was listening to her calls. The employee who misused the NSA's systems also incidentally collected the communications of a U.S. resident on two occasions, a move that requires a court warrant. [1] This was only discovered because she suspected something and talked about it to a colleague, we don't even know if the perpetrator has been disciplined. How many NSA analysts have been disciplined or had their clearance revoked for misusing these tools? [1] http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/08/23/nsa-officers-sometimes-spy-on-love-interests/ http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/08/23/nsa-officers-someti...
rayiner 13y ago
NSA surveillance raises real concerns about blackmail, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Remember, the NSA is tapping into information that, e.g., Google and Yahoo were apparently sending unencrypted between their international data centers. One of the pieces of information that's coming out from these NSA revelations is that there is a ton of private information within these companies that's exposed to far too many people.[1] From the point of view of political blackmail, there is every bit as much reason to be worried about rogue Facebook engineers as there is to be worried about rogue NSA agents. There seems to be some myopia among technologists as to this point, an idea that "NSA agent = bad" and "Facebook engineer = good" and a projection of negative intentions onto the former and positive intentions onto the latter. But at the end of the day, there is money in political blackmail, and it's not like there is no history of giant corporations engaging in political blackmail, or at least opportunistic employees at giant corporations engaging in such activity. The internet as it exists today is a system where "private" information is shared between you and thousands of your closest friends at Google, Yahoo, AT&T, Verizon, Facebook, Comcast, etc. The entire system, where information flows unencrypted through trusted service providers, is naive and broken. It was been broken since the earliest days of the internet, with clear-text protocols like SMTP, and that brokenness has simply piled on over the years. [1] While I don't support Lavabit's position of refusing to comply with lawful warrants, I do admire their architecture where the government has had to go to the highest levels of the company to get the information. It couldn't simply lean on some relatively low-level system administrator who had access to the unencrypted data.

pstuart 13y ago

Or let them get elected and blackmail them to toe the line...

junto 13y ago
This is my suspicion too. Tail wagging the dog. Obama flip-flopped on FISA [1]. He was blatantly aware of the risks it imposed. The question is why? Did someone pay him a little visit? Did some man in a black suit and dark glasses show him a little manila envelope with unknown contents, that caused him to change his mind? One year ago I would have said this was an insane proposition. Now after Snowden, I'm not that sure. That is what is really scary about the surveillance state. [1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/07/netroots-activi/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/07/netroots-activi/ [2] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2008/jul/14/obamas-wiretapping-flip-flop-yes/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2008/jul/14/...
- philwelch 13y ago
  Who was the last president to try to stand up against these agencies and what happened to him?
mtgx 13y ago
Feinstein comes to mind. Although she's probably doing it for the heck of it. She almost seems to enjoy supporting the surveillance state.
- pstuart 13y ago
  She throws enough tofu to her constituents to appear liberal (women's and LGBT rights), but is otherwise a DINO.

chatmasta 13y ago

Or, don't pay for sex if you plan on running for office.

notimetorelax 13y ago
I think you miss the point, almost anyone can be discredited with enough information and power. Take a look at Russian elections, there were no other viable candidates for a reason.
- khuey 13y ago
  "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
  - venomsnake 13y ago
    Attribute properly, after all the guy that said it was one of the greatest politicians ever to walk the world and the creator of modern Secret Service type organizations.
  - ZoF 13y ago
    -Cardinal Richelieu King Louis XIII's chief minister Hopefully that saves someone ten precious seconds; I'll never get them back!
dinkumthinkum 13y ago
I'm surprised that this seems like an unpopular view.
chatmasta 13y ago
Why does the HN mob downvote this, but upvote anything related to transparency? I thought transparency, especially amongst our elected officials, was a good idea? If a candidate for major office pays for sex, does the public have the right to know?

saraid216 13y ago

What I find scary is that we live in a nation where such scandals are capable of ending political careers. Where we even have political careers. Where we think it's okay to be worried about single politicians rather than policy in general, because eliminating a politician is capable of shuttering a policy. Where protecting someone's reputation is a necessary political factor.

detcader 13y ago
Political careers don't end. People just stop being "politicians" and start being "consultants" or "board members".
- saraid216 13y ago
  That's like saying your career as a web developer ended, but at least you're still a web designer at another company in another field. It misses the point that the project you championed for five years because it provided real value to real customers just got scrapped and tossed just to make sure none of your taint is left upon it, and half the people you helped hire in order to make it a high quality product got fired because they didn't spend enough time kissing ass rather than shipping code and you were covering for their occasional, warranted antagonism. I honestly don't give a fuck about politicians' after-careers. You failed to lynch them. Fine. We don't do seppuku in this country. Fine. No, I care, for instance, that Obama had to burn down his entire capacity to move and shake politically just to get a half-assed piece of healthcare reform into effect, and that it very well may have failed if Snowden had happened three years earlier.
  - detcader 13y ago
    I think you missed my point.. also, individual politicians represent their respective districts, I would sure hope that people in a democratic society worry about them
    - harywilke 13y ago
      With current reelection rates over 80% in congress for the last fifty years [1], one wonders if they have any need to represent their districts at all. http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/reelect.php http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/reelect.php

legutierr 13y ago

There is at least one case of character assassination that we can with near certainty attribute to the US surveillance apparatus. Eliot Spitzer was Governor of New York, former AG of New York, famous gadfly of Wall Street, and a top contender before the 2008 election to be Obama's pick for Attorney General, when it was discovered that he was paying prostitutes. The explanation as to how this information was discovered is as follows: he paid for these "services" using a wire transfer to the madam, who had created an "anonymous" corporation to collect payments, as a convenience to her wealthy and famous clients. According to Wikipedia, "The investigation of Spitzer was reportedly initiated after North Fork Bank reported suspicious transactions to the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network as required by the Bank Secrecy Act, which was enhanced by Patriot Act provisions, enacted to combat terrorist activity such as money-laundering." [1] Every bank is required by the Patriot Act to file "Suspicious Activity Reports" regarding certain activity to FinCEN, which reports must be kept secret from the person being reported upon. SARs are typically filed electronically, and then centralized in FinCEN review centers, where patterns are analyzed and information is distributed to law enforcement personnel. Spritzer was being monitored because one of the chief criteria used in determining whether a SAR should be filed is whether an individual being monitored is a "Politically Exposed Person" or PEP (that acronym is actually used actively). [2] In other words, by explicit provision of the Patriot Act and US DoT regulations, all financial activities of politicians must be monitored and reported on in secret by financial institutions. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want the US Attorney General to be someone who frequents call girls. It was Spitzer's own self-destructiveness that created the opportunity for this take down. But you have to ask, if it weren't for his aggressive anti-Wall St. stance, would he have been targeted? Perhaps he wouldn't have been. There are certainly similar transgressions committed by less "problematic" politicians that never leak. For instance, even after the whole Spitzer hullabaloo, we don't know who any of this madam's other clients were, even though it was reported that some were famous politicos. What's most significant here, though, is that we don't need to speculate about how this power can work to the advantage of certain interest groups. In this case, broad-spectrum surveillance may have resulted in Eric Holder becoming AG at the height of the financial crisis, instead of the one man perhaps most qualified by experience and temperament to prosecute financial crimes, Eliot Spitzer. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Spitzer_prostitution_scandal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Spitzer_prostitution_scan... [2] http://www.sowal.com/bb/showthread.php/21466-Unintended-Consequences-Spitzer-caught-by-Patriot-Act http://www.sowal.com/bb/showthread.php/21466-Unintended-Cons...

w_t_payne 13y ago

Given the scale of the surveillance, I am sure that there are more subtle and harder to detect approaches that could be used.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

leoc 13y ago

It doesn't strike me as particularly far out. It's not as if no-one has, say, hired the Mafia to rig the US presidential election for them within living memory.

7765668457 13y ago

So this is how it work for a lone partisan actor in the NSA: 1. Eve, the malicious analyst, wants to tank Herman Cain's campaign. She decides to look for dirt on him. 2. Using XKEYSCORE or another database, she inputs queries to collect his email traffic, and enters his public telephone number for call records. She requests chained results so she can get traffic and call records from his associates as well. 3. Some results show up in her inbox. Before she can read them, her auditor comes to her desk to ask her why she input a U.S. person's name, a likely U.S. person's email address, and a U.S. telephone number that hasn't been annotated as belonging to a foreigner in her justification (which she left blank). Without any good justification, she is escorted from the building and has her clearance revoked. Game over. She is eaten by a grue. She is lucky she didn't target a congressman, because she'd be in violation of policy that requires all congressman targeting to go through DIRNSA. Basically, the only way for this to work would be to get the analyst, auditor, supervisor, and IG to be all radicals in the same political party. And they all have no problem with losing their clearances if they're found out.

grey-area 13y ago
That's the theory. Here's the reality: The case began because a woman, a foreign national employed by the U.S. government, told another employee she suspected the man with whom she was in a sexual relationship was listening to her calls. The employee who misused the NSA's systems also incidentally collected the communications of a U.S. resident on two occasions, a move that requires a court warrant. [1] This was only discovered because she suspected something and talked about it to a colleague, we don't even know if the perpetrator has been disciplined. How many NSA analysts have been disciplined or had their clearance revoked for misusing these tools? [1] http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/08/23/nsa-officers-sometimes-spy-on-love-interests/ http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/08/23/nsa-officers-someti...

rayiner 13y ago

NSA surveillance raises real concerns about blackmail, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Remember, the NSA is tapping into information that, e.g., Google and Yahoo were apparently sending unencrypted between their international data centers. One of the pieces of information that's coming out from these NSA revelations is that there is a ton of private information within these companies that's exposed to far too many people.[1] From the point of view of political blackmail, there is every bit as much reason to be worried about rogue Facebook engineers as there is to be worried about rogue NSA agents. There seems to be some myopia among technologists as to this point, an idea that "NSA agent = bad" and "Facebook engineer = good" and a projection of negative intentions onto the former and positive intentions onto the latter. But at the end of the day, there is money in political blackmail, and it's not like there is no history of giant corporations engaging in political blackmail, or at least opportunistic employees at giant corporations engaging in such activity. The internet as it exists today is a system where "private" information is shared between you and thousands of your closest friends at Google, Yahoo, AT&T, Verizon, Facebook, Comcast, etc. The entire system, where information flows unencrypted through trusted service providers, is naive and broken. It was been broken since the earliest days of the internet, with clear-text protocols like SMTP, and that brokenness has simply piled on over the years. [1] While I don't support Lavabit's position of refusing to comply with lawful warrants, I do admire their architecture where the government has had to go to the highest levels of the company to get the information. It couldn't simply lean on some relatively low-level system administrator who had access to the unencrypted data.