10 ms·

NSA makes final push to retain most mass surveillance powers

113 points by panacea 13y ago

cookiem0nster 13y ago
Even regardless of the outcome of each program, just the fact that we're starting to have this discussion in the open is a big step forward, in my mind at least. I do understand that by discussing some of these plans we are in essence hampering their effectiveness, but my feeling is that in the grand scale of things it's a price that I think I'm willing to pay. Just my feelings.
ye 13y ago
If we spent all the billions of dollars on healthcare or medical research, we would have saved million times more people.
- timsally 13y ago
  It's not just about lives saved. This type of analysis is complicated because the costs are not always straightforward to analyze: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6890606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6890606.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - Cushman 13y ago
    Is it that complicated? An American life is generally considered (by our government) to have a value somewhere in millions[0]. Back-of-the-napkin math suggests that from an order-of-growth analysis, it may well be just about lives saved. (Roughly, each million lives saved saves a trillion dollars in economic value.) [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Estimates_of_the_value_of_life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Estimates_of_the_... As a lower bound, the lifetime earnings of an individual are $1m and up: http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acsbr11-04.pdf http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acsbr11-04.pdf
    - timsally 13y ago
      Loss of life from 9/11 was about 3,000, which using your numbers works out to be twenty million, but the total direct and indirect costs of 9/11 are in the trillions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_arising_from_the_September_11_attacks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_arising_from_t...). The insurance losses alone totaled forty billion. Innocent life lost under any circumstance is a tragedy. That said, its a multifaceted problem. Large amounts of economic damage also results in the loss of innocent life.
      - Cushman 13y ago
        Right, but I think you missed what I was saying about order of growth: the loss of life on 9/11 was very small, so economic damage due to death was relatively very small. But as loss of life increases, it makes up a larger portion of economic damage, to the point that it outweighs direct effects of terrorism. To wit, to offset that $40b loss we could either a) prevent a 9/11 scale attack or b) prevent at most 40,000 deaths of any cause. The operative difference being 1) we know for a fact that many more than 40,000 preventable deaths will happen in the next year alone and 2) we can make a good prediction about what the cost would be to prevent them.
        timsally 13y ago
        Sure, I think we can both agree that its a tradeoff that should be discussed, but lets not minimize how complex the analysis is. Money spent on preventing terrorist attacks can can have many-order effects (i.e. invention of multi-use technology), as can money spent on stopping preventable deaths. As a logical person I'll of course agree to spending money in the most effective place; our disagreement will be in how to do the cost-benefit analysis. For example, you mention preventable deaths as a good place to spend money, but the devil is in the details. Smoking, being overweight, and alcohol are the leading causes of preventable deaths in the United States and the government has been waging a campaign against these in some form or another for decades. In the case of alcohol we're actually coming up on a century. It's not a given that spending more money on the problem will actually help and if that's your position you should justify it. My reason for entering the debate is I think people generally don't think about the true cost of a successful terrorist attack. For example, a successful attack on a nuclear power plant would cost $700 billion. Even if people were thinking about costs accurately, I recognize even then there will be disagreement and I'm happy to have that debate about whether anti-terror or anti-smoking is the right place to spent money. I'm just pushing for people to think more accurately about costs because the usual level of discourse is how cars kill more people than terrorists and thats just not the whole story.
  - Ramsus 13y ago
    This is straightforward: We've spent more than 5 trillion on the war against terrorism, homeland security, NSA, and other measures as a response to 9/11. http://nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/ http://nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/ If you want to talk money and not lives, then by your citation we're spending the equivalent economical impact of a large terrorist attack every month to prevent something that is more rare than being struck with lightning from happening.
    - timsally 13y ago
      That's exactly my point. It would have been better to spend large amounts of money preventing 9/11 from happening so we wouldn't have spent the 5 trillion we did on our reaction to it (never mind the cost it had to our national psyche). If someone hits a skyscraper in NYC or the Pentagon with what is effectively a cruise missile, the US military is going to be on the ground to get the bad guys within the month and we'll stay until we find them. That's just a law of nature; its what the people demand from their government, not just in America but in general. Given that, it makes a lot of sense to spend money on preventing terrorism. The direct and indirect costs of a successful terrorist attack are huge.
- rtpg 13y ago
  Spying isn't just about saving lives, it's also about protecting national interests.
  - ye 13y ago
    I don't want my national interests to involve most of the shit NSA & Co does, including rendition, torture, spying on everyone, secret courts, secret rulings, secret laws, etc.
- RexRollman 13y ago
  Well for that matter, do we really need to try to solve every medical issue?
higherpurpose 13y ago
NSA, DHS, TSA, NYPD's "intelligence office", FBI's terror plot manufacturing - it's all one big security theater, and everyone is playing along with it. If the Utah data center is not closed down/sold off, where they plan to keep all the data on everyone on Earth, forever, then they haven't ended anything, regardless of what Obama will say on TV next week.
3stripe 13y ago
"Fear is lucrative. Fear is big business". Now that's actually a quote from a presentation about bike helmets and the culture of fear around cycling (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS9UhHf7GsQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS9UhHf7GsQ) but I think equally applicable to the culture of fear surrounding terrorism.
joshuapants 13y ago
Ignoring the privacy concerns, we spend an awful lot of money on the NSA. Tens of billions for sure. Maybe if they'd been thwarting a 9/11 every week (or if we were at risk for a 9/11-scale event semi-frequently) I'd feel that we hadn't quite wasted that money.
- f_salmon 13y ago
  You say "billions". But if you know this [0], then you start asking yourself if all that money can really be just "lost". [0] http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/11/8-5-trillion-taxpayer-money-doled-congress-pentagon-since-1996-never-accounted.html http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/11/8-5-trillion-taxpayer...
  - EliRivers 13y ago
    The money isn't "lost"; what's gone forever are millions upon millions upon millions of man-hours that could have been used to do something useful. Saying the money is lost is just a handy shorthand for expressing what a waste it all was.
middleclick 13y ago
This fear mongering was expected. Let's suppose that this is true for the sake of the argument. Does this still justify mass surveillance? No it doesn't. But the NSA knows how to play this. Most people think the NSA is doing a good job and since people think they have "nothing to hide", they would keep on supporting the NSA because it "keeps them safe".
Zigurd 13y ago
Fencepost error
f_salmon 13y ago
> But security officials are arguing strongly against curtailing the substance of domestic surveillance activities. Right. How about just having a sane and humane foreign policy instead of blowing up people all over the World? How about NOT creating hostility against the US in the first place? Did that ever cross your simple minds? Oh sorry, I forgot - this would make the NSA/military less important, so that's no option, I suppose.
Theodores 13y ago
So the one 'attack that might have been foiled' was some bloke in San Diego sending some money to someone in Somalia who might have had contact with extremists, extremists that are in Africa, a whole continent and a dozen time zones away. Liberal left wing types that supported the bombing of Afghanistan on humanitarian grounds ('we have to bomb them because if we don't then they will all starve') did not imagine for one moment that the talk of 'terrorist training camps' was utter bullshit. It was all true - to them when Donald Rumsfeld was telling them. They thought that bombing them would only encourage the terrorists. So where are they? There are plenty of immigrants fresh from Afghanistan in London, the ones you meet work hard for a living driving taxis and doing jobs white people don't like doing. So if the NSA/GCHQ have not caught any of them for being unduly fundamental-extremalist and none of them have come here to join terror cells so they can blow up thousands more innocent babies and puppies, what is going on? As a taxpayer I expect more from this clash of civilisations. I have not had any days of work due to terror bomb threats, no postcard sites have been blown up and I have no idea what the colour coded threat level is for the day.
- mjolk 13y ago
  >Liberal left wing types that supported the bombing of Afghanistan on humanitarian grounds... to them when Donald Rumsfeld was telling them. I think you're confusing your political parties. >There are plenty of immigrants fresh from Afghanistan in London, the ones you meet work hard for a living driving taxis and doing jobs white people don't like doing. Nice casual racism. >As a taxpayer I expect more from this clash of civilisations. I have not had any days of work due to terror bomb threats, no postcard sites have been blown up and I have no idea what the colour coded threat level is for the day. While I question the notion of a "clash of civilisations[sic]," you're saying this like it's a bad thing.
  - vinceguidry 13y ago
    > Nice casual racism. How is that racist?
    - mjolk 13y ago
rwmj 13y ago
At least the NSA is issuing an honest statement.
thisiswrong 13y ago
> Obama will follow the recommendations of a review group he set up, which suggested that the responsibility for the bulk domestic call records database should be transferred from the NSA to a third party, such as the phone companies Mussolini: '' Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.'' It seems each 'reform' that these authoritarian sociopaths put forward just further enables/legalizes their crimes.
- warmblood 13y ago
  >Mussolini: '' Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.'' The word "corporatism" in this context is not a very good translation. It's a real quote, but "corporation" in Mussolini's time would be more accurately translated as "guild" or any arbitrary hierarchical group of people with common interests. Corporations as we know them (commercial enterprises) weren't a thing as far as Mussolini knew. As much as I appreciate the sentiment this quote carries, it's just not applicable to anything today. Snopes thread about this: message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=36218
  - thisiswrong 13y ago
    > any arbitrary hierarchical group of people with common interests From the Guardian article: ''Obama’s White House staff were meeting representatives of tech firms on Friday, concluding a packed week packed of meetings with surveillance stakeholders'' I damn well think you could call corporate surveillance stakeholders a ''guild'' or an ''arbitrary hierarchical group of people with common interests''.
    - warmblood 13y ago
      Sure, and that's fine if you want to torture the meanings of words that way. I don't have any problem with you doing so. I have the same contempt for these people as you do but if we always let off-context quotes, righteous as they may feel, go unchalleneged, it's a shame on all of us. The context of the Mussolini quote was not uttered with a commercial enterprise in mind. Commercial enterprises called "corporations" were not a real thing in Mussolini's world. That's all I have to say here.
jbapple 13y ago
Here's a transcript of the NPR interview referenced in the article: http://www.npr.org/2014/01/10/261282601/transcript-nsa-deputy-director-john-inglis http://www.npr.org/2014/01/10/261282601/transcript-nsa-deput... Regarding the subject of the HN headline, "at most one terrorist attack might have been foiled", Inglis said: "There's a candidate for that, which is the plot that was exposed in San Diego. I think we were able to essentially tell the FBI that an individual was materially involved in terrorism that they had, three years prior, investigated based on a tip and kind of laid that case to rest. And but for the 215 Program, which we essentially tied that individual to some foreign terrorist activity overseas, the FBI would have let that case lain fallow for quite sometime. Now I cannot tell you that that wouldn't have turned up some other way. There wouldn't have been some other tool in the tool kit."
mercer 13y ago
While it seems like a good thing that the mass surveillance seems to not actually stop terrorist attacks, I feel a bit uncomfortable about this line of argument 'against' the NSA. What if they did foil many terrorist attacks? I might feel different if me or mine had been affected by such an attack, but I'd like to think that I would still be against mass surveillance, simply because the dangers of that are not offset by being safer.
- memset 13y ago
  I was mugged earlier this year. I live in a neighborhood that used to be quite rough in Brooklyn but is getting better. It was 2am and I was walking around by myself and I got mugged. He didn't take much from me: my phone (big deal) and wallet (easy to cancel credit cards.) Along with that phone he got a lot of photos - memories - of things and at that moment I wish I had automatically backed up to a private G+ album. But I didn't because I'm pro-privacy, I think. When I filed the police report, the detective walked up and down the block with me, seeing if there were any cameras to see where the person went, or to identify them. Ordinarily I would be part of the anti-mass-surveillance crowd, what is this, England? but at the time I might've appreciated a few cameras along that block so to maybe deter my mugger. I often think about this when it comes to discussions of surveillance. I, like so many hackers, want privacy, anonymity, and for the government to just go away and let us enjoy the ability to live private lives. I want Google to stop trying to save all of my personal emails, photos, text messages, and location data to the cloud. And then I say "but it would've been nice if there were a police security camera on that block." Or "I guess I have principles about google plus but I'm still out my photos." I don't think it's so unreasonable, in a sense, for someone to feel that, if in fact these efforts are foiling peoples' ability to do us harm, that they're fruitful. What is the essential difference between wanting a stronger police/watch/community force in my Brooklyn neighborhood versus the surveillance we're talking about here? Obviously there is some difference. But what is it?
  - Nursie 13y ago
    The cameras don't seem to have much deterrant effect in the UK, nor do you often hear of them catching people or convicting them through this footage. Which makes me wonder wtf they are for...
uslic001 13y ago
To me it does not seem to be worth the huge cost/enormous effort/loss of privacy/loss of guaranteed constitutional rights.
Istof 13y ago
I would rather know how many politicians they blackmailed
res0nat0r 13y ago
Actual article title: NSA makes final push to retain most mass surveillance powers
pslam 13y ago
Interesting logical fallacy they're employing: by inverting the inequality such that the upside is capped, they're strongly implying that the value is non-zero. This shifts the conversation away from the value being, in fact, zero. At most 1 person may have been killed by the official making that statement. At most 1 child may have been abducted by journalists mentioning Snowden's name. Nice trick. Wonder if it'll catch on with other officials?
leoc 13y ago
I'm a little skeptical of the conclusions drawn from these questions, especially when they're phrased in terms of surveillance data directly preventing specific attacks. From experience elsewhere it seems (I claim no expertise here) that you rarely begin looking a terrorist's or potential terrorist's communications at just the right time (neither too early nor too late) to discover a planned terrorist attack for the first time. What happens more often, apparently, is that you start looking at someone's communications and you gather information useful to turning them or someone else into an informer. Then you discover attack plans drawn up in the future because your double agent calls you up and tells you about them directly. If the US is in fact using domestic surveillance effectively to generate informers, and thus prevent terror attacks, then US alphabet-soup spokesmen might plausibly be very slow to mention much about it in response to questions asked about specific attacks being directly detected through surveillance, both because a) the question as phrased doesn't cover such operations and b) you want at almost any cost to say nothing about them. Though on the other hand, if you aren't having success in those operations you wouldn't feel like saying much about it anyway, partly because it means you're failing at counter-terrorism ...

113 points by panacea 13y ago

Even regardless of the outcome of each program, just the fact that we're starting to have this discussion in the open is a big step forward, in my mind at least. I do understand that by discussing some of these plans we are in essence hampering their effectiveness, but my feeling is that in the grand scale of things it's a price that I think I'm willing to pay. Just my feelings.

ye 13y ago

If we spent all the billions of dollars on healthcare or medical research, we would have saved million times more people.

timsally 13y ago
It's not just about lives saved. This type of analysis is complicated because the costs are not always straightforward to analyze: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6890606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6890606.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- Cushman 13y ago
  Is it that complicated? An American life is generally considered (by our government) to have a value somewhere in millions[0]. Back-of-the-napkin math suggests that from an order-of-growth analysis, it may well be just about lives saved. (Roughly, each million lives saved saves a trillion dollars in economic value.) [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Estimates_of_the_value_of_life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Estimates_of_the_... As a lower bound, the lifetime earnings of an individual are $1m and up: http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acsbr11-04.pdf http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acsbr11-04.pdf
  - timsally 13y ago
    Loss of life from 9/11 was about 3,000, which using your numbers works out to be twenty million, but the total direct and indirect costs of 9/11 are in the trillions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_arising_from_the_September_11_attacks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_arising_from_t...). The insurance losses alone totaled forty billion. Innocent life lost under any circumstance is a tragedy. That said, its a multifaceted problem. Large amounts of economic damage also results in the loss of innocent life.
    - Cushman 13y ago
      Right, but I think you missed what I was saying about order of growth: the loss of life on 9/11 was very small, so economic damage due to death was relatively very small. But as loss of life increases, it makes up a larger portion of economic damage, to the point that it outweighs direct effects of terrorism. To wit, to offset that $40b loss we could either a) prevent a 9/11 scale attack or b) prevent at most 40,000 deaths of any cause. The operative difference being 1) we know for a fact that many more than 40,000 preventable deaths will happen in the next year alone and 2) we can make a good prediction about what the cost would be to prevent them.
      - timsally 13y ago
        Sure, I think we can both agree that its a tradeoff that should be discussed, but lets not minimize how complex the analysis is. Money spent on preventing terrorist attacks can can have many-order effects (i.e. invention of multi-use technology), as can money spent on stopping preventable deaths. As a logical person I'll of course agree to spending money in the most effective place; our disagreement will be in how to do the cost-benefit analysis. For example, you mention preventable deaths as a good place to spend money, but the devil is in the details. Smoking, being overweight, and alcohol are the leading causes of preventable deaths in the United States and the government has been waging a campaign against these in some form or another for decades. In the case of alcohol we're actually coming up on a century. It's not a given that spending more money on the problem will actually help and if that's your position you should justify it. My reason for entering the debate is I think people generally don't think about the true cost of a successful terrorist attack. For example, a successful attack on a nuclear power plant would cost $700 billion. Even if people were thinking about costs accurately, I recognize even then there will be disagreement and I'm happy to have that debate about whether anti-terror or anti-smoking is the right place to spent money. I'm just pushing for people to think more accurately about costs because the usual level of discourse is how cars kill more people than terrorists and thats just not the whole story.
- Ramsus 13y ago
  This is straightforward: We've spent more than 5 trillion on the war against terrorism, homeland security, NSA, and other measures as a response to 9/11. http://nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/ http://nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/ If you want to talk money and not lives, then by your citation we're spending the equivalent economical impact of a large terrorist attack every month to prevent something that is more rare than being struck with lightning from happening.
  - timsally 13y ago
    That's exactly my point. It would have been better to spend large amounts of money preventing 9/11 from happening so we wouldn't have spent the 5 trillion we did on our reaction to it (never mind the cost it had to our national psyche). If someone hits a skyscraper in NYC or the Pentagon with what is effectively a cruise missile, the US military is going to be on the ground to get the bad guys within the month and we'll stay until we find them. That's just a law of nature; its what the people demand from their government, not just in America but in general. Given that, it makes a lot of sense to spend money on preventing terrorism. The direct and indirect costs of a successful terrorist attack are huge.
rtpg 13y ago
Spying isn't just about saving lives, it's also about protecting national interests.
- ye 13y ago
  I don't want my national interests to involve most of the shit NSA & Co does, including rendition, torture, spying on everyone, secret courts, secret rulings, secret laws, etc.
RexRollman 13y ago
Well for that matter, do we really need to try to solve every medical issue?

higherpurpose 13y ago

NSA, DHS, TSA, NYPD's "intelligence office", FBI's terror plot manufacturing - it's all one big security theater, and everyone is playing along with it. If the Utah data center is not closed down/sold off, where they plan to keep all the data on everyone on Earth, forever, then they haven't ended anything, regardless of what Obama will say on TV next week.

3stripe 13y ago

"Fear is lucrative. Fear is big business". Now that's actually a quote from a presentation about bike helmets and the culture of fear around cycling (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS9UhHf7GsQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS9UhHf7GsQ) but I think equally applicable to the culture of fear surrounding terrorism.

joshuapants 13y ago

Ignoring the privacy concerns, we spend an awful lot of money on the NSA. Tens of billions for sure. Maybe if they'd been thwarting a 9/11 every week (or if we were at risk for a 9/11-scale event semi-frequently) I'd feel that we hadn't quite wasted that money.

f_salmon 13y ago
You say "billions". But if you know this [0], then you start asking yourself if all that money can really be just "lost". [0] http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/11/8-5-trillion-taxpayer-money-doled-congress-pentagon-since-1996-never-accounted.html http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/11/8-5-trillion-taxpayer...
- EliRivers 13y ago
  The money isn't "lost"; what's gone forever are millions upon millions upon millions of man-hours that could have been used to do something useful. Saying the money is lost is just a handy shorthand for expressing what a waste it all was.

middleclick 13y ago

This fear mongering was expected. Let's suppose that this is true for the sake of the argument. Does this still justify mass surveillance? No it doesn't. But the NSA knows how to play this. Most people think the NSA is doing a good job and since people think they have "nothing to hide", they would keep on supporting the NSA because it "keeps them safe".

Zigurd 13y ago

Fencepost error

f_salmon 13y ago

> But security officials are arguing strongly against curtailing the substance of domestic surveillance activities. Right. How about just having a sane and humane foreign policy instead of blowing up people all over the World? How about NOT creating hostility against the US in the first place? Did that ever cross your simple minds? Oh sorry, I forgot - this would make the NSA/military less important, so that's no option, I suppose.

Theodores 13y ago

So the one 'attack that might have been foiled' was some bloke in San Diego sending some money to someone in Somalia who might have had contact with extremists, extremists that are in Africa, a whole continent and a dozen time zones away. Liberal left wing types that supported the bombing of Afghanistan on humanitarian grounds ('we have to bomb them because if we don't then they will all starve') did not imagine for one moment that the talk of 'terrorist training camps' was utter bullshit. It was all true - to them when Donald Rumsfeld was telling them. They thought that bombing them would only encourage the terrorists. So where are they? There are plenty of immigrants fresh from Afghanistan in London, the ones you meet work hard for a living driving taxis and doing jobs white people don't like doing. So if the NSA/GCHQ have not caught any of them for being unduly fundamental-extremalist and none of them have come here to join terror cells so they can blow up thousands more innocent babies and puppies, what is going on? As a taxpayer I expect more from this clash of civilisations. I have not had any days of work due to terror bomb threats, no postcard sites have been blown up and I have no idea what the colour coded threat level is for the day.

mjolk 13y ago
>Liberal left wing types that supported the bombing of Afghanistan on humanitarian grounds... to them when Donald Rumsfeld was telling them. I think you're confusing your political parties. >There are plenty of immigrants fresh from Afghanistan in London, the ones you meet work hard for a living driving taxis and doing jobs white people don't like doing. Nice casual racism. >As a taxpayer I expect more from this clash of civilisations. I have not had any days of work due to terror bomb threats, no postcard sites have been blown up and I have no idea what the colour coded threat level is for the day. While I question the notion of a "clash of civilisations[sic]," you're saying this like it's a bad thing.
- vinceguidry 13y ago
  > Nice casual racism. How is that racist?
  - mjolk 13y ago

rwmj 13y ago

At least the NSA is issuing an honest statement.

thisiswrong 13y ago

> Obama will follow the recommendations of a review group he set up, which suggested that the responsibility for the bulk domestic call records database should be transferred from the NSA to a third party, such as the phone companies Mussolini: '' Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.'' It seems each 'reform' that these authoritarian sociopaths put forward just further enables/legalizes their crimes.

warmblood 13y ago
>Mussolini: '' Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.'' The word "corporatism" in this context is not a very good translation. It's a real quote, but "corporation" in Mussolini's time would be more accurately translated as "guild" or any arbitrary hierarchical group of people with common interests. Corporations as we know them (commercial enterprises) weren't a thing as far as Mussolini knew. As much as I appreciate the sentiment this quote carries, it's just not applicable to anything today. Snopes thread about this: message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=36218
- thisiswrong 13y ago
  > any arbitrary hierarchical group of people with common interests From the Guardian article: ''Obama’s White House staff were meeting representatives of tech firms on Friday, concluding a packed week packed of meetings with surveillance stakeholders'' I damn well think you could call corporate surveillance stakeholders a ''guild'' or an ''arbitrary hierarchical group of people with common interests''.
  - warmblood 13y ago
    Sure, and that's fine if you want to torture the meanings of words that way. I don't have any problem with you doing so. I have the same contempt for these people as you do but if we always let off-context quotes, righteous as they may feel, go unchalleneged, it's a shame on all of us. The context of the Mussolini quote was not uttered with a commercial enterprise in mind. Commercial enterprises called "corporations" were not a real thing in Mussolini's world. That's all I have to say here.

jbapple 13y ago

Here's a transcript of the NPR interview referenced in the article: http://www.npr.org/2014/01/10/261282601/transcript-nsa-deputy-director-john-inglis http://www.npr.org/2014/01/10/261282601/transcript-nsa-deput... Regarding the subject of the HN headline, "at most one terrorist attack might have been foiled", Inglis said: "There's a candidate for that, which is the plot that was exposed in San Diego. I think we were able to essentially tell the FBI that an individual was materially involved in terrorism that they had, three years prior, investigated based on a tip and kind of laid that case to rest. And but for the 215 Program, which we essentially tied that individual to some foreign terrorist activity overseas, the FBI would have let that case lain fallow for quite sometime. Now I cannot tell you that that wouldn't have turned up some other way. There wouldn't have been some other tool in the tool kit."

mercer 13y ago

While it seems like a good thing that the mass surveillance seems to not actually stop terrorist attacks, I feel a bit uncomfortable about this line of argument 'against' the NSA. What if they did foil many terrorist attacks? I might feel different if me or mine had been affected by such an attack, but I'd like to think that I would still be against mass surveillance, simply because the dangers of that are not offset by being safer.

memset 13y ago
I was mugged earlier this year. I live in a neighborhood that used to be quite rough in Brooklyn but is getting better. It was 2am and I was walking around by myself and I got mugged. He didn't take much from me: my phone (big deal) and wallet (easy to cancel credit cards.) Along with that phone he got a lot of photos - memories - of things and at that moment I wish I had automatically backed up to a private G+ album. But I didn't because I'm pro-privacy, I think. When I filed the police report, the detective walked up and down the block with me, seeing if there were any cameras to see where the person went, or to identify them. Ordinarily I would be part of the anti-mass-surveillance crowd, what is this, England? but at the time I might've appreciated a few cameras along that block so to maybe deter my mugger. I often think about this when it comes to discussions of surveillance. I, like so many hackers, want privacy, anonymity, and for the government to just go away and let us enjoy the ability to live private lives. I want Google to stop trying to save all of my personal emails, photos, text messages, and location data to the cloud. And then I say "but it would've been nice if there were a police security camera on that block." Or "I guess I have principles about google plus but I'm still out my photos." I don't think it's so unreasonable, in a sense, for someone to feel that, if in fact these efforts are foiling peoples' ability to do us harm, that they're fruitful. What is the essential difference between wanting a stronger police/watch/community force in my Brooklyn neighborhood versus the surveillance we're talking about here? Obviously there is some difference. But what is it?
- Nursie 13y ago
  The cameras don't seem to have much deterrant effect in the UK, nor do you often hear of them catching people or convicting them through this footage. Which makes me wonder wtf they are for...

uslic001 13y ago

To me it does not seem to be worth the huge cost/enormous effort/loss of privacy/loss of guaranteed constitutional rights.

Istof 13y ago

I would rather know how many politicians they blackmailed

res0nat0r 13y ago

Actual article title: NSA makes final push to retain most mass surveillance powers

pslam 13y ago

Interesting logical fallacy they're employing: by inverting the inequality such that the upside is capped, they're strongly implying that the value is non-zero. This shifts the conversation away from the value being, in fact, zero. At most 1 person may have been killed by the official making that statement. At most 1 child may have been abducted by journalists mentioning Snowden's name. Nice trick. Wonder if it'll catch on with other officials?

leoc 13y ago

I'm a little skeptical of the conclusions drawn from these questions, especially when they're phrased in terms of surveillance data directly preventing specific attacks. From experience elsewhere it seems (I claim no expertise here) that you rarely begin looking a terrorist's or potential terrorist's communications at just the right time (neither too early nor too late) to discover a planned terrorist attack for the first time. What happens more often, apparently, is that you start looking at someone's communications and you gather information useful to turning them or someone else into an informer. Then you discover attack plans drawn up in the future because your double agent calls you up and tells you about them directly. If the US is in fact using domestic surveillance effectively to generate informers, and thus prevent terror attacks, then US alphabet-soup spokesmen might plausibly be very slow to mention much about it in response to questions asked about specific attacks being directly detected through surveillance, both because a) the question as phrased doesn't cover such operations and b) you want at almost any cost to say nothing about them. Though on the other hand, if you aren't having success in those operations you wouldn't feel like saying much about it anyway, partly because it means you're failing at counter-terrorism ...