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md224: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911261 > Anyone who defends the NSA on the grounds that it only targe

md224: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911261 > Anyone who defends the NSA on the grounds that it only targets those who are worthy of targeting needs to convince me that another COINTELPRO will never happen. I would actually welcome such an argument, since it would make me feel a whole lot better about this. You raise a very good point. I don't think there are many in the IC who would have a problem with more (and better) oversight...it helps them feel more legitimacy in what they're doing. All that being said, assume that there will be another COINTELPRO or similar. It sucks, but to be perfectly honest with you, you aren't important enough to convince one way or the other about it or about approving of the various collection programs the NSA is running. If half of the comments here are to be taken at face value, almost nobody on HN knows enough about the issues involved to be consulted or for their opinion to be considered. I'll draw a parallel here to the outcry over technology centered court cases or software patents, an opinion often given here is that engineers or software experts should be involved in deciding those cases because the layman doesn't know enough about it to have an informed opinion. It's just as true with IC issues. What's troubling is that oversight is via Congress, who until the last election were likely laypeople themselves. So the expertise to properly evaluate, oversee and monitor what's going on simply isn't there. sedev: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911078 > This reads like it was penned by someone who's never heard of the Stanford Prison experiment or Milgram's research... You bring up good points. One of the issues with the IC is one of internal monitoring (as we're all now seeing). Who watches the watchers? There's notionally a number of very serious laws, or committees and counter-X professionals who are supposed to be doing this, but to be honest. Once you're cleared and stuck on a project, there's really very little day-to-day oversight of any kind. I personally would welcome a higher level of scrutiny, but I think the equation of "spend manpower watching watchers" vs. "spend manpower looking for bad guys out in the world" has, and will continue to, balance on the later. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911091 > If you'd never heard of parallel construction before today, that seems to powerfully undermine your credibility. He only worked there for two years on a single program. I challenge anybody here who works for any organization larger than 3 people to have perfect knowledge of every single thing their organization is doing. Unless you work on the bits that interface with the LE community you'd probably never have had opportunity to know anything about it. I bet he also doesn't know the details of companies the NSA contracts to do their plumbing or handle their trash. EthanHeilman: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910896 > The NSA has a history of sharing intelligence with LE, to state that the NSA is not a LE agency is extremely misleading, if not an outright lie. I don't think you understand what a LE entity is, the powers and limitations that LE organizations operate under or how they differ from IC organizations. Saying the NSA is LE because they cooperate with LE is like saying the Department of Agriculture or Labor is an LE agency because they sometimes have to cooperate with LE. jjoonathan: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910922 > It's good to hear that many NSA employees take the police/military distinction seriously, but we know for a fact that some higher-ups don't... This is true, and it's particularly vexing to work in the IC and have senior officials asking you to participate in outright illegal activities. It doesn't happen often, but I've seen both people ruin their careers saying no and those that want to keep their job and say yes. It's usually under the auspices of "helping out to stop bad things", and it's very hard to say no when activities are couched that way...despite very many of the people on here talking publicly about their very righteous and moral high ground, placed in the same position, the vast majority of HN users would want to stop bad things from happening even if it meant crossing the line a bit here or there. Because, honestly, if you choice is help stop innocents from getting killed vs. sit on your hands because of some futzy law someplace that ties your hands, most of us would feel like we'd rather take the immediate action to stop the bad guys. "Mission Expediency" is the word of the day when it comes to these matters. mtgentry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910911 > No offense to OP, but this reads like propaganda to me. I can confirm that this represents the mindset of most of the people I've worked with in the IC. It does take a certain kind of personality to sign-up and go through all the hassles involved with getting employed in the IC and that self-selection seems to attract a certain kind of personality type. > But I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of concerted effort by the NSA to encourage a dialogue with hackers on platforms like HN. There really isn't, other than to not discuss classified information. Keeping track of what's classified and not when you spend near a third of your life and half of your waking hours dealing with only classified things is complex enough that most people just don't engage with the "unclean" public. jurjenh: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911235 > What I'd be more interested in is how much this issue is being discussed internally. If these discussions are allowed, or even surreptitiously encouraged, then I'd take that as a possible internal propaganda push, subtle as it may be. Discussions about these issues, in the way that they're being discussed here, are not terribly common. The milieu of working in the IC just doesn't lend itself to these kinds of topics, in these kinds of ways, as focuses of conversation. Mostly what's discussed is the lines you aren't supposed to cross and the penalties for crossing them. But more often then not, casual conversation is about anything other than IC topics. After a hard day of spying, you really want to just engage in something else. Bizarrely, discussing Snowden might be tricky inside of the IC because you might discuss something that was leaked that you technically don't have a need-to-know for. So specific cases like this are not often serious topics of conversation. (continued next comment)

secthrowaway 13y ago
pera: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911100 > Really? why should anyone trust in anything coming from the NSA when you are systematically lying again and again? why should we listen to anything you say when historically, part of your strategy is to try to influence the PoV of society || specifics groups? OP is not the NSA. OP was an employee for a couple years and can only comment about what he specifically knows about, just like anybody. Take what he says with that context. alfiejohn_: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911106 (ex-)Employees can write about anything, but if it involves IC related topics, they have to submit to a review before publication. All those various books about life in the Spy world or Special Forces etc. all went through similar reviews. malloreon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911226 > There are articles suggesting this is happening many thousands of times per year - shouldn't each of these 'regular employees' be put on trial? They have committed serious crimes. Quite often they are. The minimum penalty is loss of clearance and job (which is a career death sentence in the IC), and depending on what they did and if the agency feels like it's a good expenditure of resources, some kind of criminal prosecution may be involved. e.g. - Employee sees if his own cell phone number has been collected (violates rules regarding looking up U.S. persons): probably a firing, but not worth criminal prosecution - Employee starts a side business and starts monitoring communications of his competitors to get a leg up, probably a firing + prison time. te_chris: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910858 > Thank you so much, kind American intelligence guy, for having the grace to not look at USA citizens emails, all the while not even mentioning foreigners, who should apparently just lie down and take it. Foreigners don't just "take it", they have their own nation's intelligence apparatus collecting against their foreigners. Let me know when there are mass protests against foreign collection in the rest of the world and maybe then your complaint will make some kind of sense. Until then it's just bitter complaining about something you knew all along anyway. It's kind of the point of Intelligence. lucb1e: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911262 > Why is a distinction made between US and non-US people? Because, at least in the U.S., there's a distinction between IC and LE entities -- this is not a distinction shared by most countries. LE deals with domestic events and U.S. people, while IC deals with non-domestic actors and locations. There's a bit of overlap, for example, a U.S. citizen doing bad things in a foreign country gets a bit of both, or a foreign national in the U.S. But that's generally where the line is drawn. U.S. law doesn't apply outside of the U.S. and it shouldn't. Can you imagine the world if the U.S. suddenly decided that France had to apply by all U.S. laws including the U.S. Constitution? If people think New Zealand cooperating on > What makes me a potential criminal, and Mr. Smith not? The reverse is true of U.S. citizens w/r to other country's intelligence apparatus as well. IC agencies generally aren't looking for criminals...meaning they aren't looking for people who broke U.S. law. They're basically looking for threats to U.S. soil, citizens and concerns. LE agencies look for law breakers. That's one of the reasons why the trials at GTMO are such a mess, guys were wrapped up and sent off to Cuba for interrogation based on "Intelligence" but not using information collected as part of a criminal prosecution. IC and LE really do operate under very different methods (at least in the U.S.). princeverma: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911007 > I am a foreign national, I and my company uses services provided by a US company (email etc.), and this gives right to you guys to collect and ready my emails? Yes. Look at your question from a different angle, under what legal regime is the U.S. not allowed to do so? Or the contrapositive, what are you doing to prevent your country from spying on U.S. Citizens? Tarang: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910916 > If an employee had a contrarian opinion to the NSA would it be declassified like this one? Yes. You can check Amazon yourself for books by former NSA employees who don't side with the Agency. Their books were all reviewed by the NSA for classified information, but not for dissenting opinions. muglug: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910838 > Do you think Snowdon's revelations had any beneficial impact, or is your view of them entirely negative? Disappointingly no. At least in my circles, Snowden is not mentioned in polite terms. The likely outcome will be no change in NSA collections or capabilities, but automation in system administration, better collection of auditable information on IC employees and more compartmentalizing of the activities even further. room271: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910827 > My question to the OP: even if you believe that at the moment abuses are rare and that your colleagues are trustworthy and law-abiding, does the capability and level of information concern you in terms of the potential for future abuse it enables? I'll toss in my answer too. I think it is serious cause for concern. But the kind of work the IC does is hard and I'd say impossible to get right. Anybody who thinks the kinds of work that most of us do in our day-to-day businesses is hard have no idea how really difficult the industry is. In a normal business, if you get things wrong you might get sued or shut down. In the Spy industry? countries might fall, nukes might loose and people might die. Doing that kind of work in balance with people's rights, or at least not negatively impacting truly innocent people is among the hardest things to do in the world. aaron695: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911046 > "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Doing nothing would be for the U.S. to not spy at all, which is a sentiment shared by many in this forum. And then bad things would certainly happen for the U.S. because no other country would do the same. Sometimes doing the right thing really involves doing hard things that don't feel good. I won't make any apologies for it and nor should the OP. The kind of work that the IC and the military does, make no mistake about it, is ugly ugly work. It is very important though that this public debate be held often, and constantly. The IC/Military construct is like a huge guard dog. You want it a bit mean and angry, but you don't want it to bite you, the mailman or the neighborhood kids...it's not so bad if it goes after the occasional solicitor or burgler. So it's very important that you keep a constant eye on it and keep it in check. Because it will dig up your yard, chew up the sofa and otherwise misbehave.

secthrowaway 13y ago

pera: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911100 > Really? why should anyone trust in anything coming from the NSA when you are systematically lying again and again? why should we listen to anything you say when historically, part of your strategy is to try to influence the PoV of society || specifics groups? OP is not the NSA. OP was an employee for a couple years and can only comment about what he specifically knows about, just like anybody. Take what he says with that context. alfiejohn_: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911106 (ex-)Employees can write about anything, but if it involves IC related topics, they have to submit to a review before publication. All those various books about life in the Spy world or Special Forces etc. all went through similar reviews. malloreon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911226 > There are articles suggesting this is happening many thousands of times per year - shouldn't each of these 'regular employees' be put on trial? They have committed serious crimes. Quite often they are. The minimum penalty is loss of clearance and job (which is a career death sentence in the IC), and depending on what they did and if the agency feels like it's a good expenditure of resources, some kind of criminal prosecution may be involved. e.g. - Employee sees if his own cell phone number has been collected (violates rules regarding looking up U.S. persons): probably a firing, but not worth criminal prosecution - Employee starts a side business and starts monitoring communications of his competitors to get a leg up, probably a firing + prison time. te_chris: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910858 > Thank you so much, kind American intelligence guy, for having the grace to not look at USA citizens emails, all the while not even mentioning foreigners, who should apparently just lie down and take it. Foreigners don't just "take it", they have their own nation's intelligence apparatus collecting against their foreigners. Let me know when there are mass protests against foreign collection in the rest of the world and maybe then your complaint will make some kind of sense. Until then it's just bitter complaining about something you knew all along anyway. It's kind of the point of Intelligence. lucb1e: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911262 > Why is a distinction made between US and non-US people? Because, at least in the U.S., there's a distinction between IC and LE entities -- this is not a distinction shared by most countries. LE deals with domestic events and U.S. people, while IC deals with non-domestic actors and locations. There's a bit of overlap, for example, a U.S. citizen doing bad things in a foreign country gets a bit of both, or a foreign national in the U.S. But that's generally where the line is drawn. U.S. law doesn't apply outside of the U.S. and it shouldn't. Can you imagine the world if the U.S. suddenly decided that France had to apply by all U.S. laws including the U.S. Constitution? If people think New Zealand cooperating on > What makes me a potential criminal, and Mr. Smith not? The reverse is true of U.S. citizens w/r to other country's intelligence apparatus as well. IC agencies generally aren't looking for criminals...meaning they aren't looking for people who broke U.S. law. They're basically looking for threats to U.S. soil, citizens and concerns. LE agencies look for law breakers. That's one of the reasons why the trials at GTMO are such a mess, guys were wrapped up and sent off to Cuba for interrogation based on "Intelligence" but not using information collected as part of a criminal prosecution. IC and LE really do operate under very different methods (at least in the U.S.). princeverma: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911007 > I am a foreign national, I and my company uses services provided by a US company (email etc.), and this gives right to you guys to collect and ready my emails? Yes. Look at your question from a different angle, under what legal regime is the U.S. not allowed to do so? Or the contrapositive, what are you doing to prevent your country from spying on U.S. Citizens? Tarang: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910916 > If an employee had a contrarian opinion to the NSA would it be declassified like this one? Yes. You can check Amazon yourself for books by former NSA employees who don't side with the Agency. Their books were all reviewed by the NSA for classified information, but not for dissenting opinions. muglug: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910838 > Do you think Snowdon's revelations had any beneficial impact, or is your view of them entirely negative? Disappointingly no. At least in my circles, Snowden is not mentioned in polite terms. The likely outcome will be no change in NSA collections or capabilities, but automation in system administration, better collection of auditable information on IC employees and more compartmentalizing of the activities even further. room271: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910827 > My question to the OP: even if you believe that at the moment abuses are rare and that your colleagues are trustworthy and law-abiding, does the capability and level of information concern you in terms of the potential for future abuse it enables? I'll toss in my answer too. I think it is serious cause for concern. But the kind of work the IC does is hard and I'd say impossible to get right. Anybody who thinks the kinds of work that most of us do in our day-to-day businesses is hard have no idea how really difficult the industry is. In a normal business, if you get things wrong you might get sued or shut down. In the Spy industry? countries might fall, nukes might loose and people might die. Doing that kind of work in balance with people's rights, or at least not negatively impacting truly innocent people is among the hardest things to do in the world. aaron695: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911046 > "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Doing nothing would be for the U.S. to not spy at all, which is a sentiment shared by many in this forum. And then bad things would certainly happen for the U.S. because no other country would do the same. Sometimes doing the right thing really involves doing hard things that don't feel good. I won't make any apologies for it and nor should the OP. The kind of work that the IC and the military does, make no mistake about it, is ugly ugly work. It is very important though that this public debate be held often, and constantly. The IC/Military construct is like a huge guard dog. You want it a bit mean and angry, but you don't want it to bite you, the mailman or the neighborhood kids...it's not so bad if it goes after the occasional solicitor or burgler. So it's very important that you keep a constant eye on it and keep it in check. Because it will dig up your yard, chew up the sofa and otherwise misbehave.