6 ms·

I'd argue that the NSA needs to retain limited spying capabilities, but with very very strict control of how the data is used and stored. Dragnet surveillance i

by dm2 12y ago

I'd argue that the NSA needs to retain limited spying capabilities, but with very very strict control of how the data is used and stored. Dragnet surveillance is not acceptable or necessary. It's the sharing of this information that should be dramatically limited. Other government agencies (at federal, state, and local levels) need to be prevented from actively spying on citizens. Corporations also need to be prevented from spying on citizens, they are just as bad and just as careless with data. I'd love some discussion on this topic, please convince me I'm wrong. Of course there needs to be more regulation on the long-term storage of this data (1-2 years max seems sufficient) and the sharing of this data (absolutely no sharing with other agencies unless it's a major threat to national security) and absolutely no sharing any access of these databases with foreign governments. The NSA plays a critical role in keeping the country safe. It's becoming easier and easier for crazy, misguided, and foreign enemies to harm the nation and it's citizens, somebody has to protect us. Other countries are not going to give up their NSA equivalents and eliminating the NSA would cripple US intelligence. Knowledge is power is especially true when dealing with the scale that governments deal with. The fact is that the US is one of the prime targets for terrorism, both independent and foreign nation sponsored.

cowbell 12y ago
I'd argue that this behavior is in violation of international law as well as the constitution. http://gigaom.com/2014/07/16/un-human-rights-report-blows-apart-governments-pro-surveillance-arguments/ http://gigaom.com/2014/07/16/un-human-rights-report-blows-ap...
- dm2 12y ago
  Things have changed dramatically since the constitution was conceived. Nobody predicted the internet, WMDs (which could easily be smuggled into the country, they're not just movie fiction), and other nations having spying capabilities. My main thought is that the US must stay ahead of other nations intelligence agencies. Other than protecting myself, my family, and the country I don't really have a good reason for this though.
  - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
    > My main thought is that the US must stay ahead of other nations intelligence agencies. The solution to this is to make surveillance hard for everybody. Pass laws and build technologies that make bulk surveillance not only prohibited but impractical regardless of third party lawlessness. The goal is not to thwart only the NSA, that barely accomplishes anything. You also have to thwart China, Russia, organized crime, malicious corporations, etc.
    - csandreasen 12y ago
      How does preventing the NSA from looking at traffic crossing an internet backbone serve to thwart China, Russia, organized crime, malicious corporations, etc.? If anything, I'd think it would give them an advantage. (Note that I'm not saying that there shouldn't be limits on what the NSA can do, only that stopping other malicious actors isn't applicable in this case)
      - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
        > How does preventing the NSA from looking at traffic crossing an internet backbone serve to thwart China, Russia, organized crime, malicious corporations, etc.? Because it gets the NSA and its budget out of the "make security worse" business and puts them back full in the "make security better" business. Because if they aren't allowed to do it then they won't want anyone else to be able to do it either.
        csandreasen 12y ago
        I'd argue that sorry state of internet security is almost entirely the result of bad coding practices/protocol design, and the private sector in general neither has the will to fix it nor wants the NSA to assist in fixing it. In fact, as it stands right now, NSA isn't even responsible for fixing public sector network security issues - what little responsibility the government takes for that largely falls on DHS and NIST. According to their web page[1], NSA is responsible for securing classified government networks. Killing off their intelligence component isn't going to make the internet safer for US citizens. [1] http://www.nsa.gov/about/faqs/index.shtml http://www.nsa.gov/about/faqs/index.shtml
davekeck 12y ago
Of course the NSA needs this ability -- as an agency whose recognized goal is having information, they of course will always need all information. The question is whether we need the NSA, and whether we're willing to forfeit our rights and principles to provide them with all information.
- dm2 12y ago
  Our "rights" were put in place before mass communications were available, long before the internet was conceived. Presidents being shot. Planes flying into buildings. A nuclear weapon or any bomb being detonated inside of the country are all things that I do not want to happen. I don't know how to prevent these without SIGINT dominance. If these events can be prevented without the chance of any human using the collected data for any other purpose and the data only being stored for a very short period of time, then I'd have to say I'm on the side of the NSA. I think that corporations and law-enforcement agencies using intelligence and mass collection techniques are much more of a threat. Yes, the sharing and data-retention of the NSA should be greatly limited and controlled and monitored in my opinion, but eliminating their ability to protect the country (their ultimate goal) might not be worth it.
  - pwg 12y ago
    Read up on the "base rate fallacy" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy). Specifically example 3 from the Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy#Example_3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy#Example_3). The result of the "base rate fallacy" in the context of the bulk data collection program is that the false positives will swamp the true positives in any general search results from the data-set.
    - dm2 12y ago
      Regarding Example #3, you investigate ~10,000 citizens and only ~100 are real terrorists, when we are talking about peoples lives, it's worth saving as many as possible in my opinion. There is also the fear aspect that is difficult to calculate. How does fear of a terrorist attack affect the economy? Just look at the Ford Pinto. It was calculated that it would be cheaper to pay the families of victims than it was to fix the exploding gas tank.
csandreasen 12y ago
I'm curious as to what the EFF would propose as an alternative that both allows the NSA to conduct legitimate intelligence operations on the internet and provide acceptable privacy protections. I look at that diagram attached to the article with the two giant filters, the first of which says "filtering aimed at eliminating fully domestic transactions", but they consider it unconstitutional right from the beginning before it even hits the first filter. It strikes me as akin to giving someone a task like "implement grep, but don't read any lines from stdin which don't contain your search term."
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  If your goal is to stop engaging in domestic bulk surveillance, it's a pretty simple first step that you shouldn't be looking at any domestic bulk traffic that never crosses the national border. You don't have to look at the content of traffic to determine its geographical location.
  - csandreasen 12y ago
    That's perfectly fine, but this case is built on testimony from Mark Klein concerning Room 641A, which is right on the coastline (it's in San Francisco). That seems to me to likely be an ideal place to capture international traffic.
    - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
      Well, I would argue the ideal place to capture international traffic would be... internationally. It's pretty hard to capture traffic between Iran and Pakistan from a room in California. But you're just avoiding the issue. The fact that there is an international peering point in San Francisco is no excuse for them to be capturing traffic between San Francisco and Houston or New York.
      - csandreasen 12y ago
        Yeah, it'd pretty hard to capture traffic between Iran and Pakistan, but not, say, Russia and Venezuela. The US is a huge hub for traffic transiting the globe, and the risks associated with setting up a foreign collections facility don't apply to a domestic facility. How am I avoiding the issue? I have absolutely no problem with the NSA intercepting foreign traffic - that's their job. The EFF page shows them filtering out domestic traffic in their diagram, and Mark Klein's testimony, on which the EFF is building their Jewel v. NSA case, doesn't actually demonstrate any interception of US traffic.
oolala 12y ago
> "The fact is that the US is one of the prime targets for terrorism, both independent and foreign nation sponsored." Might be worth working at not doing things that make one a prime target instead. This would be a better investment from what I can see. Just look at the growth of ISIS in Iraq. Our governments seem to create more enemies with every attempt to quash them.
- dm2 12y ago
  I do agree that targeted killings are doing more harm than good. There are interviews with special operations soldiers saying that they would receive a kill list, they would work their way down the list, then the next month the new kill list would be much longer. If you raid a house, kill the father/brother/uncle and maybe have some collateral damage, it doesn't matter whether or not that person was against America, you've converted several people in that family and community against America because we just became the terrorists. America not being a popular target for terrorism is a much more difficult problem to solve. People are crazy, ignorance combined with religion leads to misguided people, even jealousy is a factor. Foreign nations will do almost anything to increase the wealth of their country, that would be very difficult to prevent.
nitrogen 12y ago
The fact is that the US is one of the prime targets for terrorism, both independent and foreign nation sponsored. Is that truly an established fact? And if so, why not figure out why (as suggested by another comment) instead of simply retaliating?
- ccvannorman 12y ago
  This map sums it up. The US scored 3-5 on the terrorism scale that goes up to :: 191 ::. http://www.nesec.org/images/haz_globe2001.jpg http://www.nesec.org/images/haz_globe2001.jpg
  - nitrogen 12y ago
    Interesting. What is the unit of measurement, and is it normalized for population?
  - dm2 12y ago
    If you eliminated the NSA, what do you think our terrorism score would be? Higher, or lower? That number probably directly relates to deaths caused by terrorism. "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."
    - nitrogen 12y ago
      What about all the other branches of government that have brought loads of known (and who knows how much unknown) blowback?
    - PavlovsCat 12y ago
      > "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all." So what's stopping the NSA from claiming they prevent alien invasions on a daily basis? After all, it's classified, so how would you know either way?
ScottBurson 12y ago
I too think there might be some compromise possible along these lines. The most troubling thing to me about the current situation is that the NSA often gives tips to the FBI and other domestic law enforcement agencies. There needs to be an absolute barrier here, so the NSA shares nothing short of clear evidence of an imminent terrorist plot threatening at least dozens of lives. Anything smaller than that is not a matter of national security. Unfortunately, such a compromise might be difficult to enforce. Parallel construction[0] can be used to hide the original reason someone came under suspicion. So I don't know. But I think it's worth thinking about. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
- dm2 12y ago
  That was exactly what was happening before 9/11 and the Patriot Act. Other agencies argued that they couldn't properly do their job because they didn't have access to the information the NSA collected. I think it should go back the way it was. Only filtered data that is critical to national security should leave the NSA. There should be public reports and committees to ensure that is happening. The Patriot Act pretty much says, "here is access to everything, you can even share it with other nations".
- csandreasen 12y ago
  If you go back to the original Reuters article[1] (first link from your Wikipedia aritcle), there's a few nuances that most people bringing up parallel construction don't point out: (emphasis mine) "...Today, the SOD offers at least three services to federal, state and local law enforcement agents: coordinating international investigations such as the Bout case; distributing tips from overseas NSA intercepts, informants, foreign law enforcement partners and domestic wiretaps; and circulating tips from a massive database known as DICE. ... ...Wiretap tips forwarded by the SOD usually come from foreign governments, U.S. intelligence agencies or court-authorized domestic phone recordings. Because warrantless eavesdropping on Americans is illegal, tips from intelligence agencies are generally not forwarded to the SOD until a caller's citizenship can be verified, according to one senior law enforcement official and one former U.S. military intelligence analyst." [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...

by dm2 12y ago

cowbell 12y ago

I'd argue that this behavior is in violation of international law as well as the constitution. http://gigaom.com/2014/07/16/un-human-rights-report-blows-apart-governments-pro-surveillance-arguments/ http://gigaom.com/2014/07/16/un-human-rights-report-blows-ap...

dm2 12y ago
Things have changed dramatically since the constitution was conceived. Nobody predicted the internet, WMDs (which could easily be smuggled into the country, they're not just movie fiction), and other nations having spying capabilities. My main thought is that the US must stay ahead of other nations intelligence agencies. Other than protecting myself, my family, and the country I don't really have a good reason for this though.
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  > My main thought is that the US must stay ahead of other nations intelligence agencies. The solution to this is to make surveillance hard for everybody. Pass laws and build technologies that make bulk surveillance not only prohibited but impractical regardless of third party lawlessness. The goal is not to thwart only the NSA, that barely accomplishes anything. You also have to thwart China, Russia, organized crime, malicious corporations, etc.
  - csandreasen 12y ago
    How does preventing the NSA from looking at traffic crossing an internet backbone serve to thwart China, Russia, organized crime, malicious corporations, etc.? If anything, I'd think it would give them an advantage. (Note that I'm not saying that there shouldn't be limits on what the NSA can do, only that stopping other malicious actors isn't applicable in this case)
    - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
      > How does preventing the NSA from looking at traffic crossing an internet backbone serve to thwart China, Russia, organized crime, malicious corporations, etc.? Because it gets the NSA and its budget out of the "make security worse" business and puts them back full in the "make security better" business. Because if they aren't allowed to do it then they won't want anyone else to be able to do it either.
      - csandreasen 12y ago
        I'd argue that sorry state of internet security is almost entirely the result of bad coding practices/protocol design, and the private sector in general neither has the will to fix it nor wants the NSA to assist in fixing it. In fact, as it stands right now, NSA isn't even responsible for fixing public sector network security issues - what little responsibility the government takes for that largely falls on DHS and NIST. According to their web page[1], NSA is responsible for securing classified government networks. Killing off their intelligence component isn't going to make the internet safer for US citizens. [1] http://www.nsa.gov/about/faqs/index.shtml http://www.nsa.gov/about/faqs/index.shtml

davekeck 12y ago

Of course the NSA needs this ability -- as an agency whose recognized goal is having information, they of course will always need all information. The question is whether we need the NSA, and whether we're willing to forfeit our rights and principles to provide them with all information.

dm2 12y ago
Our "rights" were put in place before mass communications were available, long before the internet was conceived. Presidents being shot. Planes flying into buildings. A nuclear weapon or any bomb being detonated inside of the country are all things that I do not want to happen. I don't know how to prevent these without SIGINT dominance. If these events can be prevented without the chance of any human using the collected data for any other purpose and the data only being stored for a very short period of time, then I'd have to say I'm on the side of the NSA. I think that corporations and law-enforcement agencies using intelligence and mass collection techniques are much more of a threat. Yes, the sharing and data-retention of the NSA should be greatly limited and controlled and monitored in my opinion, but eliminating their ability to protect the country (their ultimate goal) might not be worth it.
- pwg 12y ago
  Read up on the "base rate fallacy" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy). Specifically example 3 from the Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy#Example_3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy#Example_3). The result of the "base rate fallacy" in the context of the bulk data collection program is that the false positives will swamp the true positives in any general search results from the data-set.
  - dm2 12y ago
    Regarding Example #3, you investigate ~10,000 citizens and only ~100 are real terrorists, when we are talking about peoples lives, it's worth saving as many as possible in my opinion. There is also the fear aspect that is difficult to calculate. How does fear of a terrorist attack affect the economy? Just look at the Ford Pinto. It was calculated that it would be cheaper to pay the families of victims than it was to fix the exploding gas tank.

csandreasen 12y ago

I'm curious as to what the EFF would propose as an alternative that both allows the NSA to conduct legitimate intelligence operations on the internet and provide acceptable privacy protections. I look at that diagram attached to the article with the two giant filters, the first of which says "filtering aimed at eliminating fully domestic transactions", but they consider it unconstitutional right from the beginning before it even hits the first filter. It strikes me as akin to giving someone a task like "implement grep, but don't read any lines from stdin which don't contain your search term."

AnthonyMouse 12y ago
If your goal is to stop engaging in domestic bulk surveillance, it's a pretty simple first step that you shouldn't be looking at any domestic bulk traffic that never crosses the national border. You don't have to look at the content of traffic to determine its geographical location.
- csandreasen 12y ago
  That's perfectly fine, but this case is built on testimony from Mark Klein concerning Room 641A, which is right on the coastline (it's in San Francisco). That seems to me to likely be an ideal place to capture international traffic.
  - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
    Well, I would argue the ideal place to capture international traffic would be... internationally. It's pretty hard to capture traffic between Iran and Pakistan from a room in California. But you're just avoiding the issue. The fact that there is an international peering point in San Francisco is no excuse for them to be capturing traffic between San Francisco and Houston or New York.
    - csandreasen 12y ago
      Yeah, it'd pretty hard to capture traffic between Iran and Pakistan, but not, say, Russia and Venezuela. The US is a huge hub for traffic transiting the globe, and the risks associated with setting up a foreign collections facility don't apply to a domestic facility. How am I avoiding the issue? I have absolutely no problem with the NSA intercepting foreign traffic - that's their job. The EFF page shows them filtering out domestic traffic in their diagram, and Mark Klein's testimony, on which the EFF is building their Jewel v. NSA case, doesn't actually demonstrate any interception of US traffic.

oolala 12y ago

> "The fact is that the US is one of the prime targets for terrorism, both independent and foreign nation sponsored." Might be worth working at not doing things that make one a prime target instead. This would be a better investment from what I can see. Just look at the growth of ISIS in Iraq. Our governments seem to create more enemies with every attempt to quash them.

dm2 12y ago
I do agree that targeted killings are doing more harm than good. There are interviews with special operations soldiers saying that they would receive a kill list, they would work their way down the list, then the next month the new kill list would be much longer. If you raid a house, kill the father/brother/uncle and maybe have some collateral damage, it doesn't matter whether or not that person was against America, you've converted several people in that family and community against America because we just became the terrorists. America not being a popular target for terrorism is a much more difficult problem to solve. People are crazy, ignorance combined with religion leads to misguided people, even jealousy is a factor. Foreign nations will do almost anything to increase the wealth of their country, that would be very difficult to prevent.

nitrogen 12y ago

The fact is that the US is one of the prime targets for terrorism, both independent and foreign nation sponsored. Is that truly an established fact? And if so, why not figure out why (as suggested by another comment) instead of simply retaliating?

ccvannorman 12y ago
This map sums it up. The US scored 3-5 on the terrorism scale that goes up to :: 191 ::. http://www.nesec.org/images/haz_globe2001.jpg http://www.nesec.org/images/haz_globe2001.jpg
- nitrogen 12y ago
  Interesting. What is the unit of measurement, and is it normalized for population?
- dm2 12y ago
  If you eliminated the NSA, what do you think our terrorism score would be? Higher, or lower? That number probably directly relates to deaths caused by terrorism. "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."
  - nitrogen 12y ago
    What about all the other branches of government that have brought loads of known (and who knows how much unknown) blowback?
  - PavlovsCat 12y ago
    > "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all." So what's stopping the NSA from claiming they prevent alien invasions on a daily basis? After all, it's classified, so how would you know either way?

ScottBurson 12y ago

I too think there might be some compromise possible along these lines. The most troubling thing to me about the current situation is that the NSA often gives tips to the FBI and other domestic law enforcement agencies. There needs to be an absolute barrier here, so the NSA shares nothing short of clear evidence of an imminent terrorist plot threatening at least dozens of lives. Anything smaller than that is not a matter of national security. Unfortunately, such a compromise might be difficult to enforce. Parallel construction[0] can be used to hide the original reason someone came under suspicion. So I don't know. But I think it's worth thinking about. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

dm2 12y ago
That was exactly what was happening before 9/11 and the Patriot Act. Other agencies argued that they couldn't properly do their job because they didn't have access to the information the NSA collected. I think it should go back the way it was. Only filtered data that is critical to national security should leave the NSA. There should be public reports and committees to ensure that is happening. The Patriot Act pretty much says, "here is access to everything, you can even share it with other nations".
csandreasen 12y ago
If you go back to the original Reuters article[1] (first link from your Wikipedia aritcle), there's a few nuances that most people bringing up parallel construction don't point out: (emphasis mine) "...Today, the SOD offers at least three services to federal, state and local law enforcement agents: coordinating international investigations such as the Bout case; distributing tips from overseas NSA intercepts, informants, foreign law enforcement partners and domestic wiretaps; and circulating tips from a massive database known as DICE. ... ...Wiretap tips forwarded by the SOD usually come from foreign governments, U.S. intelligence agencies or court-authorized domestic phone recordings. Because warrantless eavesdropping on Americans is illegal, tips from intelligence agencies are generally not forwarded to the SOD until a caller's citizenship can be verified, according to one senior law enforcement official and one former U.S. military intelligence analyst." [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...