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>Unfortunately, you won't find a government spokesman or politician coming out and admitting that in most cases... IMO these overstatements of threat are far l

>Unfortunately, you won't find a government spokesman or politician coming out and admitting that in most cases... IMO these overstatements of threat are far less benign than that. I believe they know that the true scope and scale of their secret surveillance activities can only be justified using extreme scare tactics, such as the threat of terrorism. I believe this is true even if the American public was in full understanding of whatever nuanced policy benefits actually resulted for the citizenry as a whole. That is, the problem may well be that the benefits do not accrue to the general populace, but to a much narrower set of vested interests. So, if Americans knew fully and exactly who benefited and to what degree, they may find that said benefits for the general populace do not justify the NSA's "attack" on the general populace. So, this is not about avoiding a nuanced conversation. It's that the the measures themselves have been turned against the U.S. citizenry such that the benefits of the resulting policy decisions do not outweigh the affront to privacy and Constitutional rights. If these affronts cannot be justified even while they are turning their powers against the very people who are supposed to be the beneficiaries, then we must naturally ask the question "then whose interests are really being served here?" That is the real conversation that they wish to avoid. Further evidence of the dissonance is revealed when you consider the NSA SIGINT mission statement you provided. It's a very generic statement that wouldn't cause concern given what we knew and expected of the NSA's actual activities (i.e. prior to the Snowden leaks). It's only when you realize the fuller scale of NSA activity and its targeting of the broader U.S. population that this statement seems woefully inadequate to justify the attendant activities.

mpyne 13y ago
> It's only when you realize the fuller scale of NSA activity and its targeting of the broader U.S. population that this statement seems woefully inadequate to justify the attendant activities. I've not even seen evidence that NSA is actually targeting the greater American population though. The issue is that NSA has expanded the scope of what they look at, and made it easier for their analysts to get away with assuming someone is not an "USPER". That obviously carries a greater risk of lumping Americans into that net where they wouldn't have before, but no one (not even Snowden, AFAICS) has been able to demonstrate the NSA is actually trying to deliberately target Americans with any of this.
- unclebucknasty 13y ago
  Well, I think here the word targeting is a matter of semantics. I mean, if you know that you are engaged in programs that will necessarily sweep in vast amounts of data from the American population, then you are not not targeting them. I think this is what's unsettled those who are unsettled. So, we can call it the "dissolution of presumed protections" instead of targeting, but for this discussion, I don't believe that it matters. That is, by any name, to the extent that Americans feel that the NSA has transgressed against its own citizens, the NSA's justification has been terrorism. EDIT: To be clear, I believe there is considerable compelling evidence that Americans are routinely targeted through various programs. I just don't think it's necessary to have that debate in the context of this discussion.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    I think you're right about it being semantics. In fact I think that would explain a lot of the reaction on all sides. E.g. when we allow the FBI to wiretap people pursuant to a lawfully-issued warrant, that's in reality done with the understanding that the FBI had the technical capability to execute that wiretap, warrant or not. The warrant isn't technically required anymore, it's only a procedural safeguard. But most people do not necessarily spend a lot of time thinking about how the FBI could be listening to all of their phone calls, since they know that they are not actually being targeted in practice. So it is on what is truly a global Internet. The IP packets don't go flying around with "I'm an American" bits set, so in the end the only real safeguard if you're going to try to mine data of national interest from the Internet is procedural. At best technical safeguards could be used within the NSA's various data warehouses after collection has occurred, but there's no way to get around the fact that American and non-American data is intermingled everywhere on the Internet. Is this a satisfactory state of affairs? Nope! If you're a privacy advocate you might say that the response is to simply stop collecting intelligence at all and accept all the consequences that follow from that. If you're kind of in the middle you might want to add more oversight, transparency and other safeguards to retain the ability to gain intelligence (not just for counter-terrorism, but for everything the nation needs it for), while not risking mass abuse of civil liberties by differenting definitions of "targeting". But the sea change was not the NSA deciding to spy on Americans, it was Americans deciding to join the rest of the world on a global network, a problem the NSA didn't previously have to really sort through. I won't say I agree with all the inventive ways they've found to try to collect intelligence, but nor do I think that there is some directed effort by NSA to violate American civil liberties as a goal in and of itself. You're right that "terrorism!" has been their go-to reasoning in the public eye, but to be fair that is one of the big things the people are large are concerned with and, to parrot the top comment on this thread, the full truth about diplomatic cloak-and-dagger games is rather nuanced.

mpyne 13y ago

> It's only when you realize the fuller scale of NSA activity and its targeting of the broader U.S. population that this statement seems woefully inadequate to justify the attendant activities. I've not even seen evidence that NSA is actually targeting the greater American population though. The issue is that NSA has expanded the scope of what they look at, and made it easier for their analysts to get away with assuming someone is not an "USPER". That obviously carries a greater risk of lumping Americans into that net where they wouldn't have before, but no one (not even Snowden, AFAICS) has been able to demonstrate the NSA is actually trying to deliberately target Americans with any of this.

unclebucknasty 13y ago
Well, I think here the word targeting is a matter of semantics. I mean, if you know that you are engaged in programs that will necessarily sweep in vast amounts of data from the American population, then you are not not targeting them. I think this is what's unsettled those who are unsettled. So, we can call it the "dissolution of presumed protections" instead of targeting, but for this discussion, I don't believe that it matters. That is, by any name, to the extent that Americans feel that the NSA has transgressed against its own citizens, the NSA's justification has been terrorism. EDIT: To be clear, I believe there is considerable compelling evidence that Americans are routinely targeted through various programs. I just don't think it's necessary to have that debate in the context of this discussion.
- mpyne 13y ago
  I think you're right about it being semantics. In fact I think that would explain a lot of the reaction on all sides. E.g. when we allow the FBI to wiretap people pursuant to a lawfully-issued warrant, that's in reality done with the understanding that the FBI had the technical capability to execute that wiretap, warrant or not. The warrant isn't technically required anymore, it's only a procedural safeguard. But most people do not necessarily spend a lot of time thinking about how the FBI could be listening to all of their phone calls, since they know that they are not actually being targeted in practice. So it is on what is truly a global Internet. The IP packets don't go flying around with "I'm an American" bits set, so in the end the only real safeguard if you're going to try to mine data of national interest from the Internet is procedural. At best technical safeguards could be used within the NSA's various data warehouses after collection has occurred, but there's no way to get around the fact that American and non-American data is intermingled everywhere on the Internet. Is this a satisfactory state of affairs? Nope! If you're a privacy advocate you might say that the response is to simply stop collecting intelligence at all and accept all the consequences that follow from that. If you're kind of in the middle you might want to add more oversight, transparency and other safeguards to retain the ability to gain intelligence (not just for counter-terrorism, but for everything the nation needs it for), while not risking mass abuse of civil liberties by differenting definitions of "targeting". But the sea change was not the NSA deciding to spy on Americans, it was Americans deciding to join the rest of the world on a global network, a problem the NSA didn't previously have to really sort through. I won't say I agree with all the inventive ways they've found to try to collect intelligence, but nor do I think that there is some directed effort by NSA to violate American civil liberties as a goal in and of itself. You're right that "terrorism!" has been their go-to reasoning in the public eye, but to be fair that is one of the big things the people are large are concerned with and, to parrot the top comment on this thread, the full truth about diplomatic cloak-and-dagger games is rather nuanced.