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This is where the NSA overreaches: collecting data on innocent Americans either incidentally or deliberately, and data on foreign citizens indiscriminately. Pu

• a3n 13y ago
  > Is it really an "overreach" if the NSA can acquire the mobile phone records of Yemen "indiscriminately" and use the data to build social graphs for current and future (currently unknown) targets of interest? If all they do is foreign activity like that, then no, probably. That they routinely and indiscriminantly collect mine and other Americans' data, yes. You can't put aside US collection, because it's a huge part of their activity. They are arguably routing around the Constitution.
  • twoodfin 13y ago
    If all they do is foreign activity like that, then no, probably. But that's not what Schneier wrote. He specifically calls out indiscriminate bulk surveillance of foreign citizens as "overreach", even without making a distinction between U.S. allies and adversaries. Again, I'm not interested in having yet another discussion about exactly which data the NSA is or isn't allowed to collect accidentally or deliberately on U.S. citizens. If you think there have been a paucity of discussion threads about that, feel free to start another one.
    • gr3yh47 13y ago
      it's not only overreach, it's obvious human rights abuse people have a right to not be indiscriminately surveilled by every country that they don't live in.
      • rayiner 13y ago
        > people have a right to not be indiscriminately surveilled by every country that they don't live in. [citation needed]
        • a3n 13y ago
          That's a good point. I would say that society is, or at least can be, what we make of it. In this area we've most of us given the decisions for surveillance and other hostile activity to politicians and bureaucrats. It doesn't necessarily have to be that way.
          • jafaku 13y ago
            Nobody gave the power to the politicians, except previous politicians.
        • jellicle 13y ago
          > Article 12. > No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
          • rayiner 13y ago
            > Article 22. > Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality. What does this even mean? > Article 25. > (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. Sounds pretty cushy. > Article 27. > (2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author. You're literally violating peoples' human rights when you torrent that music! > Article 29. > (1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible. What does this even mean? The UDHR is a supremely silly document. It takes a grab bag of things that are desirable within a particular society, and elevates them to the status of human rights.
• HarryHirsch 13y ago
  Is it really an "overreach" if the NSA can acquire the mobile phone records of Yemen "indiscriminately" and use the data to build social graphs for current and future (currently unknown) targets of interest? That's not his line of argument. He says that bulk collection of data will not remain confined to the Yemen - there will be mission and scope creep, to include indiscriminate data collection on US citizens and the whole world. That way lies the "Deep State".
  • twoodfin 13y ago
    How do you read the piece that way? He calls bulk data collection useless: "It doesn't make us any safer." If he were carving out kinds of bulk foreign surveillance that would be acceptable were it not for the potential for abuse, I think it would be clearer. Or are you discussing something else he has written?
    • HarryHirsch 13y ago
      Schneier calls bulk spying worse than useless. What he says is (emphasis mine): "This is where the NSA overreaches: collecting data on innocent Americans either incidentally or deliberately, and data on foreign citizens indiscriminately. It doesn't make us any safer, and it is liable to be abused." We know that politicians like to keep dirt on their opponents to protect their fiefdoms, and we have seen the phenomenon of sudden, unexplained resignations. We also know that government oversight of the secret agencies is lax. Some say effective oversight is not possible. I admit to bias here - Germans of a certain generation are intimately familiar with the abuses of the Stasi.
• dllthomas 13y ago
  I, for one, would accept a marginal increase in an already unlikely risk (terrorist attack) if it means better respecting the rights of innocents in Yemen. I'm not even convinced it would mean an increase, as the good will derived from respect may dominate.
  • twoodfin 13y ago
    What American security planners are worried about is exactly that marginal increase. Suppose Yemen (sorry to pick on Yemen) becomes a secure base for bad guys who manage to bomb an airplane, a subway, or a major sporting event somewhere in the world "merely" half a dozen times a year. You can argue all you want about how you'd still be more likely to die from a traffic accident, but that won't change the political pressure for action. Frankly, a lot of that pressure would be rational: The costs of disruptive attacks of course go way beyond the mere casualties, even if everyone involved is perfectly stoic. Now you're looking at the potential for a military incursion, dramatically escalated security at transportation hubs and public events, and/or a bunch of other responses that you might find a whole lot more distasteful than the intelligence agency of a democratic government keeping tabs on phone calls in an unstable country.
    • dllthomas 13y ago
      I know that's what they're worried about (assuming good faith on their part). The potential downside is not tiny[1], but the question is what change in the likelihood is produced by the change in policy. Remember that we are not talking about forgoing all intelligence gathering; we are specifically talking about focusing on HUMINT and targetted surveillance instead of mass surveillance. Resources spent on mass surveillance are not spent elsewhere. I contend that the change from shifting resources to mass surveillance is likely to be small (if it's even in the desired direction). And a small change is something I want to bear if it is the price of respecting the rights of innocent people, because I am not a coward. [1] Though if we keep our heads - which is what I've advocated consistently - it can be small. Sadly, I don't think that's likely, but we should continue to push for it. Fear of terrorism is how democracies fall - anyone saying "you need to be freaking out about terrorism" is the enemy.
• belorn 13y ago
  > Is it really an "overreach" if the NSA can acquire the mobile phone records of Yemen "indiscriminately Yes. You can not commit act of violence indiscriminately just-in-case. The US army could place a bomb under every house in Yemen, just in case that they would need to bomb it later. Would that be an overreach? If they don't activate them, how can it be harmful?
  • rayiner 13y ago
    Dealing with the necessities of the real world means drawing lines, and just because it may be ridiculous to draw the line in one place does not mean that the whole exercise is ridiculous. At the opposite extreme: even if a terrorist is heading at you with an AK-47, you shouldn't "commit an act of violence" because what if he chances his mind and decides not to shoot you?
    • belorn 13y ago
      That is comparing indiscriminately violence to self defense against a specific identified person. The lines are not that silly. Yes, you can defend yourself against someone pointing a gun at you. No, you can not use a nuke, or release biological weapons that kill indiscriminately everyone in the whole nation. Reactions should be appropriate to the threat, and indiscriminately violence is rarely if ever appropriate.
      • rayiner 13y ago
        Where is anyone releasing a nuke or a biological weapon indiscriminately at people?
        • bediger4000 13y ago
          It's a "reductio ad absurdum" argument. You know, test for the extreme values that can be passed into a function to see if that function can handle them. If it can handle the extremes, and a few other values correctly it probably handles everything correctly.
  • 13y ago
• tking8924 13y ago
  > Is it really an "overreach" if the NSA can acquire the mobile phone records of Yemen "indiscriminately" and use the data to build social graphs for current and future (currently unknown) targets of interest? Is it an overreach if the Yemeni government "indiscriminately" collects the mobile phone records of US citizens? Or, more realistically, China, Russia, UK, Germany, etc...? It seems to me, when you carry out that kind of surveillance (really any sort of wide reaching security/military tactics) you can only expect reciprocity. And at that point why even be bothered if the NSA can collect American data? Even if they cannot legally capture it on their own, they know exactly where they need to go to get it... I guess my point really boils down to "Do unto others...".
  • twoodfin 13y ago
    Is it an overreach if the Yemeni government "indiscriminately" collects the mobile phone records of US citizens? Or, more realistically, China, Russia, UK, Germany, etc...? By my thinking, no, not at all. It's life in the modern world of sovereign states and power politics. And of course one of the NSA's jobs is to make that kind of surveillance harder. (I'm less sanguine about the kinds of intelligence sharing operations with allies that are indeed end-runs around the Fourth Amendment.)
• asn0 13y ago
  In theory, having every bit of data would be useful. In practice (a decade or more of NSA collecting phone records), this doesn't seem to be the case. Multiple terrorist events have happened, but apparently NSA was not able to use all that data to detect or prevent them. Where the data has been most useful has been in persecuting journalists and political rivals and whistle blowers and circumventing due process in courts. I'd bet on NSA destroying our democracy long before a terrorist could.
• pizza234 13y ago
  Scheier previously wrote his opionion about this subject. I can't find it straight away, but the problem is that militaristic rhetoric presents mass-surveillance as straightforward and productive, while in reality - the way Schneier presents it - it's not. A very serious problem is also that indiscriminate collection tends to be related to indiscriminate action; there have been some examples in HN in the last times.
• logfromblammo 13y ago
  The division between citizens, residents, and nonresident concitizens does not exist in the law. The constitution recognizes the rights of "the people". It does not mention any other criterion. Foreigners have exactly the same rights to privacy and due process under the constitution as Americans under American law. The difference in practice stems from the difficulties foreigners have suing for civil rights violations in American courts. State and federal district courts do not have personal or territorial jurisdiction over the plaintiff. The Supreme Court is reluctant to hear cases that have not already been decided by those lower courts. So a foreigner has to file directly with the Supreme Court, and they, unsurprisingly, refuse to hear the case. As a result, the ability of the executive to violate the civil rights of nonresident noncitizens is effectively unchecked. Arms of the executive routinely break American law while abroad, utterly without fear of reprisal. It would be naive in the extreme to think that mere laws could curtail military and industrial espionage, but when it comes to massive, Stasi-like domestic surveillance, you'd think that the law would at least make a dent. The law is clear: no searches without specific warrants based on reasonable articulable suspicion. Forget who should be doing the legwork. Who the hell would be reading and signing all those warrants? The mere fact that Bruce Schneier can be tricked into making a distinction between foreign and domestic is telling, because warrantless, suspicionless surveillance of foreigners is still an illegal infringement upon their civil rights to privacy and due process!
• deleted 13y ago
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• declan 13y ago
  If the NSA were only "acquir[ing] the mobile phone records of Yemen" and nothing else, Edward Snowden would not have risked everything by leaking thousands of documents and we would not be having this discussion today. Put another way, if you're characterizing the debate as merely about "acquir[ing] the mobile phone records of Yemen," you haven't been following the debate.
  • twoodfin 13y ago
    Schneier is suggesting reforms we should initiate based on the Snowden revelations. One of those proposed reforms is, apparently, the elimination of bulk foreign data collection by any intelligence agency. I think that's an unreasonable limitation for the reasons I articulated. I'm not sure what about that claim indicates I'm not following the debate.
    • declan 13y ago
      You are correct that Bruce mentioned, in passing, that it may not be a good idea for the NSA to collect "data on foreign citizens indiscriminately." It's of course possible and perhaps reasonable to argue that Yemen has a far higher percentage of AQ leaders than, say, Canada, so vacuuming up all of Yemen's phone records is not "indiscriminate." But the point I was making is that it's especially alarming when the NSA's giant electronic ear is turned inward, and the spy agency uses these vast powers granted for overseas surveillance for domestic surveillance. The Yemeni government can't order the NSA to hand over information gathered on Yemeni citizens. The U.S. government, on the other hand, can order the NSA to hand over information gathered on U.S. citizens. That is what a good portion -- certainly not all, but a good portion -- of the NSA debate is about. (Also see: "DEA use of NSA intercepts for domestic criminal prosecutions.")