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Section 215 concerns both foreign and domestic signals, allowing for the collection of metadata. Section 702 focuses on the content of foreign intelligence. Whi

Section 215 concerns both foreign and domestic signals, allowing for the collection of metadata. Section 702 focuses on the content of foreign intelligence. While 215 is debatable, 702 serves a distinctly different purpose. IF your concern is domestic surveillance, particularly sharing metadata that originates in the US with law enforcement, than this can be considered a win. IF you think collection of foreign intelligence should be limited, which of course is in the US's interest, then you are out of luck. Considering the majority of people say faulty intelligence is to blame for the Iraq war, it's difficult for me to encourage less intelligence surrounding foreign intelligence gathering. But I'm partial, as an American who prefers to know who and what and why we are actually fighting. It's not like we can take everyone's word for it.

zanny 11y ago
> faulty intelligence is to blame for the Iraq war, it's difficult for me to encourage less intelligence surrounding foreign intelligence gathering How about - how would you rather spend your money, spying on foreigners living in destitution, or fixing our roads? The international spy network the US maintains is probably a paltry drop in the bucket of the preposterous defense budget in this country, but honestly anything to curtail that black hole of taxpayer dollars is a win in my book. If we weren't destroying the lives of millions around the globe with our imperialism, we wouldn't have enemies to suicide bomb us with planes to require massive spy networks to try to catch American dissenters planning to commit jihad against us. The military industrial complex only exists insofar as the American people are complacent to being global police forcing their will upon anyone who does not fall in line with what the US wants. And that is after we already have trade sanctions that can decimate countries overnight. This isn't 1970 anymore. We don't need to have a dick waving contest with the next largest nuclear arsenal trying to ruin the lives of billions of people in a juvenile game to show who is the coolest kid, whose god is the best, or whose economic model should rule the world. Maybe its time to just back the fuck off and take our tendrils out of every nation on Earth for once and maybe try to be good to our fellow man.
- dragontamer 11y ago
  So we stop spying on people? Let me ask you: do you think it is better or worse that we _know_ about ISIS? Mind you, Obama knows enough about ISIS that he is confident to keep troops out of the Middle East. Would he have that confidence if it weren't for the spy network? Or would it be closer to a George Bush ordeal with Iraq War. George Bush was working off of a CIA that was cut by 20% to 30% by Clinton. He was practically flying blind. (Yes, when you lose 25% of your _workers_ between 1990 and 2000, the CIA will begin to make some pretty crappy decisions) Here's another question. Do you think Israel would have continued to stand down against Iran if it weren't for the intelligence sharing programs between US and Israel? Intelligence stops wars. Intelligence tempers decisions. When leaders fly blind, they instead make hasty decisions and over-react to threats. Lets say the US stops spying on Iran... what do you think Israel will do without any information? Hell, there's a reason why the US spies on Israel, and Israel spies on us. Even allies spy on each other: its the most reliable source of information. Even _with_ information sharing agreements, countries will spy on each other behind each other's backs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pollard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pollard Frankly, I'd want to know what Israel's plans are if we stopped giving them information. Don't you? I mean, yeah, we support them and all... but lets hope they're not gonna do anything crazy (like... use their nukes, or something). Or do you think Israel will actually tell us these details, even if they are our Allies? Nah man, the only way you make decisions as a leader is to spy on other leaders, figure out what they're thinking, and then make plans based on that.
  - jqm 11y ago
    Intelligence also overthrows societies and destroys lives for raw material gain in the hands of those who would use it for such. Can we assume white knights are in charge here?
    - dragontamer 11y ago
      Intelligence does jack diddly crap. If a spy spies on you, you'll never know your entire life. CIA moves a bit beyond "intelligence" work with Seal Team 6 and the trigger on drone strikes. CIA is closer to "Paramilitary". But the pure HUMINT work that the CIA does is extremely important to understanding the world. Can we assume white knights are in charge here? Elect a good president in 2016. Lets keep the white knights in charge. Warmongerers are definitely vying for power. With the presidency comes command and control of the largest, strongest, most advanced nuclear missile stock on the planet. And control of the largest navy. And control of the largest army. Believe me, intelligence is needed to keep those guys pointing their guns at the right targets.
jqm 11y ago
While agreeing faulty intelligence was probably responsible for the Iraq war I don't think it was the spy agency kind.
geophile 11y ago
The intelligence wasn't faulty, it was cooked to reach the desired conclusion -- that Iraq needed to be invaded. Raw intelligence that supported this conclusion was cherry-picked. Other inconvenient facts were ignored.
- briholt 11y ago
  In the past few weeks there's been a concerted effort to rewrite the history leading up the Iraq war as a big "whoopsies!" Now that the whole process has come to light, with all of it's incompetence and misdeeds, it's hard for me to believe anyone would buy this. The only possible reason I can imagine is that those who supported the war want to soothe their egos rather than own up to their mistakes. They're manufacturing their own excuse so they can say to themselves, "How could I have know any better? No one could have known." But I seriously doubt this will gain any traction outside of the die hard circles. No 13-year-old will grow up to think the brazenly contrived and wildly inaccurate intelligence was just some unlucky accident.
  - tedunangst 11y ago
    ? Was there something in geophile's comment implying it was an "accident"?
justanother 11y ago
Anyone with an Internet connection can now see from Congressional-level reports that Saudi hijackers received embassy-level support from the Saudi government for their actions, or that the Iraqi 'Yellow Cake' fairy tales were exactly that. At the advice of our intelligence agencies, we invaded, and continue to 'advise' ... Afghanistan and Iraq, even as the logistical and air conditioning bills alone for such actions constitute the world's largest military expenditures. I might even be willing to entertain Sec 702 if I could see for one moment how it helps in such light (ie, when the 'intelligence agencies' manufacture politically expedient fiction instead of honest SIGINT and HUMINT).
- selimthegrim 11y ago
  This. Anybody saying US-Israel intelligence sharing is the major factor in preventing a war is blind. Whenever Netanyahu and his ilk want to get reelected they run to the UN and wave 10 Minutes to Midnight infographics about Iran, completely ignoring real issues like inequality and cost of living. It's the sanity of the Israeli intelligence community preventing a war, not the intelligence sharing.
- e12e 11y ago
  Between Generation Kill[1], See No Evil[2] and The Afghan Nightmare[3] (and other sources, other wars, other regions), it's hard to see how intelligence is working at all. In particular [3], which deals with a NATO commander in Afghanistan is telling: Considering the British have been involved in the area for hundreds of years, the US has been involved for decades -- one wonders how one could possibly construct mission parameters that are clearly pure fantasy. I'm still not sure if it is the result of gross incompetence, or stems from ulterior motives (or a more likely; a combination) -- either way the idea that the intelligence services help prevent wars (at least the parts concerned with sigint) -- is hard to take at face value. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Kill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Kill [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_No_Evil_(book) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_No_Evil_(book) [3] http://www.riff.it/scheda-film/?id=7515 http://www.riff.it/scheda-film/?id=7515
sgnelson 11y ago
This statement, "Considering the majority of people say faulty intelligence is to blame for the Iraq war, it's difficult for me to encourage less intelligence surrounding foreign intelligence gathering." is incomplete/incorrect/missing the point/whatever you want to call a polite way of saying "wrong" for a number of reasons, I will state them, in no particular order below. First, you are confusing data collection and data analysis. It doesn't matter how much and what type of "intelligence" (a misnomer if there ever was one) if you're simply talking about raw data collected from a variety of sources. The data must be parsed and made sense of. In the CIA/NSA/FBI of the 1990's and 2000's, there was a very obvious failure (again, for a number of reasons, some due to simple mistakes, some due to bureaucratic incompetence, some due to political reasons.) to correctly interpret this data. Oops, but hey, it's only a few billion dollars and few tens of thousands of lives. Second, post-9/11, given the amount of resources spent on intelligence collecting in the Middle East, it's hard to believe that there was anything more that could have been done in terms of signal collections than going full on Big Brother and installing a data collecting device in every person's bunghole in the entire region. Third, note I said "signal collections," because one of the things people say isn't that it was simply faulty intelligence gathering (or analysis as I discussed above) but also an over reliance on the exact type of data we were gathering, ie, things that float through the ether. We didn't have enough of the old school, human intelligence of the early cold war, that could have helped in making a better determination of whether or not Saddam actually had WMD's (or was building them, whatever). The Human Intelligence they did have, was from special interests that had their own reasons to get rid of Saddam, and there was very little (at least seemingly from the outside) checking on these human sources. So, too few human resources, as well as resources who had their own agendas. That's never going to work out well. Finally, none of that mattered. The data we had, through the political will of the Administration of the time, was massaged to fit the story, not the other way around. They had a narrative ("Saddam has WMD's"), and then they cherry picked data to support that "conclusion." Only after the fact did the whole "faulty intelligence" story come out, because, you know, it's easier to blame that than saying "yeah, we had a hard on for the guy and we wanted to take him out regardless of what the real story was." But you said it yourself: "It's not like we can take everyone's word for it." I had a few more points to make, but I'm tired, it's late, I've written enough. But now Saddam and his WMD's are gone, we have ISIS taking over Iraq, so I guess it all worked out in the end. So the NSA should keep hoovering up all that data, what could go wrong?
higherpurpose 11y ago
> Considering the majority of people say faulty intelligence is to blame for the Iraq war You're kidding right? "Faulty intelligence" was not responsible for the Iraq war. A lie was. More or "better" intelligence wouldn't have changed that (and didn't). Also FISA is already used in a "reverse" way to spy on Americans. If you "communicate" (as little as liking on Facebook) to a "foreigner" (anyone who either is located on a non-American IP or uses encryption), then FISA can be used to spy on you.
cm2187 11y ago
Faulty intelligence was the scape goat for the war in Iraq. The reality is that the CIA was asked to find reasons to justify a war. And like every good administration it obliged. I think another example where we will observe this sort of forced bias imposed on what should be an impartial community is climate change research. Scientists are asked and given budget to prove that there is a climate change, and that it is man made, and that it will have disastrous consequences. Any study who challenges this is attacked as motivated by financial interests or as conspiracy theorist and is starved of budgets and discredited. And I am sure that we will find that this political pressure will result in completely biased conclusions. And who will be blamed in 20 years for this? The scientific community of course!
pluma 11y ago
> Considering the majority of people say faulty intelligence is to blame for the Iraq war Am I the only one that remembers that the Iraq war was not based on "faulty" intelligence but outright fabrications? This was pointed out at the time and so well-known international politicians quickly backed down from using the US intelligence as justification for the war (going back to handwaving and talking about solidarity).
- arethuza 11y ago
  Now you can see why Orwell was so keen on exploring the mutability of the past in 1984.
Zigurd 11y ago
"Faulty" intelligence was not the cause of the Iraq war. Our leaders knew they were starting a war of aggression.

zanny 11y ago

> faulty intelligence is to blame for the Iraq war, it's difficult for me to encourage less intelligence surrounding foreign intelligence gathering How about - how would you rather spend your money, spying on foreigners living in destitution, or fixing our roads? The international spy network the US maintains is probably a paltry drop in the bucket of the preposterous defense budget in this country, but honestly anything to curtail that black hole of taxpayer dollars is a win in my book. If we weren't destroying the lives of millions around the globe with our imperialism, we wouldn't have enemies to suicide bomb us with planes to require massive spy networks to try to catch American dissenters planning to commit jihad against us. The military industrial complex only exists insofar as the American people are complacent to being global police forcing their will upon anyone who does not fall in line with what the US wants. And that is after we already have trade sanctions that can decimate countries overnight. This isn't 1970 anymore. We don't need to have a dick waving contest with the next largest nuclear arsenal trying to ruin the lives of billions of people in a juvenile game to show who is the coolest kid, whose god is the best, or whose economic model should rule the world. Maybe its time to just back the fuck off and take our tendrils out of every nation on Earth for once and maybe try to be good to our fellow man.

dragontamer 11y ago
So we stop spying on people? Let me ask you: do you think it is better or worse that we _know_ about ISIS? Mind you, Obama knows enough about ISIS that he is confident to keep troops out of the Middle East. Would he have that confidence if it weren't for the spy network? Or would it be closer to a George Bush ordeal with Iraq War. George Bush was working off of a CIA that was cut by 20% to 30% by Clinton. He was practically flying blind. (Yes, when you lose 25% of your _workers_ between 1990 and 2000, the CIA will begin to make some pretty crappy decisions) Here's another question. Do you think Israel would have continued to stand down against Iran if it weren't for the intelligence sharing programs between US and Israel? Intelligence stops wars. Intelligence tempers decisions. When leaders fly blind, they instead make hasty decisions and over-react to threats. Lets say the US stops spying on Iran... what do you think Israel will do without any information? Hell, there's a reason why the US spies on Israel, and Israel spies on us. Even allies spy on each other: its the most reliable source of information. Even _with_ information sharing agreements, countries will spy on each other behind each other's backs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pollard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pollard Frankly, I'd want to know what Israel's plans are if we stopped giving them information. Don't you? I mean, yeah, we support them and all... but lets hope they're not gonna do anything crazy (like... use their nukes, or something). Or do you think Israel will actually tell us these details, even if they are our Allies? Nah man, the only way you make decisions as a leader is to spy on other leaders, figure out what they're thinking, and then make plans based on that.
- jqm 11y ago
  Intelligence also overthrows societies and destroys lives for raw material gain in the hands of those who would use it for such. Can we assume white knights are in charge here?
  - dragontamer 11y ago
    Intelligence does jack diddly crap. If a spy spies on you, you'll never know your entire life. CIA moves a bit beyond "intelligence" work with Seal Team 6 and the trigger on drone strikes. CIA is closer to "Paramilitary". But the pure HUMINT work that the CIA does is extremely important to understanding the world. Can we assume white knights are in charge here? Elect a good president in 2016. Lets keep the white knights in charge. Warmongerers are definitely vying for power. With the presidency comes command and control of the largest, strongest, most advanced nuclear missile stock on the planet. And control of the largest navy. And control of the largest army. Believe me, intelligence is needed to keep those guys pointing their guns at the right targets.

jqm 11y ago

While agreeing faulty intelligence was probably responsible for the Iraq war I don't think it was the spy agency kind.

geophile 11y ago

The intelligence wasn't faulty, it was cooked to reach the desired conclusion -- that Iraq needed to be invaded. Raw intelligence that supported this conclusion was cherry-picked. Other inconvenient facts were ignored.

briholt 11y ago
In the past few weeks there's been a concerted effort to rewrite the history leading up the Iraq war as a big "whoopsies!" Now that the whole process has come to light, with all of it's incompetence and misdeeds, it's hard for me to believe anyone would buy this. The only possible reason I can imagine is that those who supported the war want to soothe their egos rather than own up to their mistakes. They're manufacturing their own excuse so they can say to themselves, "How could I have know any better? No one could have known." But I seriously doubt this will gain any traction outside of the die hard circles. No 13-year-old will grow up to think the brazenly contrived and wildly inaccurate intelligence was just some unlucky accident.
- tedunangst 11y ago
  ? Was there something in geophile's comment implying it was an "accident"?

justanother 11y ago

Anyone with an Internet connection can now see from Congressional-level reports that Saudi hijackers received embassy-level support from the Saudi government for their actions, or that the Iraqi 'Yellow Cake' fairy tales were exactly that. At the advice of our intelligence agencies, we invaded, and continue to 'advise' ... Afghanistan and Iraq, even as the logistical and air conditioning bills alone for such actions constitute the world's largest military expenditures. I might even be willing to entertain Sec 702 if I could see for one moment how it helps in such light (ie, when the 'intelligence agencies' manufacture politically expedient fiction instead of honest SIGINT and HUMINT).

selimthegrim 11y ago
This. Anybody saying US-Israel intelligence sharing is the major factor in preventing a war is blind. Whenever Netanyahu and his ilk want to get reelected they run to the UN and wave 10 Minutes to Midnight infographics about Iran, completely ignoring real issues like inequality and cost of living. It's the sanity of the Israeli intelligence community preventing a war, not the intelligence sharing.
e12e 11y ago
Between Generation Kill[1], See No Evil[2] and The Afghan Nightmare[3] (and other sources, other wars, other regions), it's hard to see how intelligence is working at all. In particular [3], which deals with a NATO commander in Afghanistan is telling: Considering the British have been involved in the area for hundreds of years, the US has been involved for decades -- one wonders how one could possibly construct mission parameters that are clearly pure fantasy. I'm still not sure if it is the result of gross incompetence, or stems from ulterior motives (or a more likely; a combination) -- either way the idea that the intelligence services help prevent wars (at least the parts concerned with sigint) -- is hard to take at face value. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Kill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Kill [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_No_Evil_(book) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_No_Evil_(book) [3] http://www.riff.it/scheda-film/?id=7515 http://www.riff.it/scheda-film/?id=7515

sgnelson 11y ago

This statement, "Considering the majority of people say faulty intelligence is to blame for the Iraq war, it's difficult for me to encourage less intelligence surrounding foreign intelligence gathering." is incomplete/incorrect/missing the point/whatever you want to call a polite way of saying "wrong" for a number of reasons, I will state them, in no particular order below. First, you are confusing data collection and data analysis. It doesn't matter how much and what type of "intelligence" (a misnomer if there ever was one) if you're simply talking about raw data collected from a variety of sources. The data must be parsed and made sense of. In the CIA/NSA/FBI of the 1990's and 2000's, there was a very obvious failure (again, for a number of reasons, some due to simple mistakes, some due to bureaucratic incompetence, some due to political reasons.) to correctly interpret this data. Oops, but hey, it's only a few billion dollars and few tens of thousands of lives. Second, post-9/11, given the amount of resources spent on intelligence collecting in the Middle East, it's hard to believe that there was anything more that could have been done in terms of signal collections than going full on Big Brother and installing a data collecting device in every person's bunghole in the entire region. Third, note I said "signal collections," because one of the things people say isn't that it was simply faulty intelligence gathering (or analysis as I discussed above) but also an over reliance on the exact type of data we were gathering, ie, things that float through the ether. We didn't have enough of the old school, human intelligence of the early cold war, that could have helped in making a better determination of whether or not Saddam actually had WMD's (or was building them, whatever). The Human Intelligence they did have, was from special interests that had their own reasons to get rid of Saddam, and there was very little (at least seemingly from the outside) checking on these human sources. So, too few human resources, as well as resources who had their own agendas. That's never going to work out well. Finally, none of that mattered. The data we had, through the political will of the Administration of the time, was massaged to fit the story, not the other way around. They had a narrative ("Saddam has WMD's"), and then they cherry picked data to support that "conclusion." Only after the fact did the whole "faulty intelligence" story come out, because, you know, it's easier to blame that than saying "yeah, we had a hard on for the guy and we wanted to take him out regardless of what the real story was." But you said it yourself: "It's not like we can take everyone's word for it." I had a few more points to make, but I'm tired, it's late, I've written enough. But now Saddam and his WMD's are gone, we have ISIS taking over Iraq, so I guess it all worked out in the end. So the NSA should keep hoovering up all that data, what could go wrong?

higherpurpose 11y ago

> Considering the majority of people say faulty intelligence is to blame for the Iraq war You're kidding right? "Faulty intelligence" was not responsible for the Iraq war. A lie was. More or "better" intelligence wouldn't have changed that (and didn't). Also FISA is already used in a "reverse" way to spy on Americans. If you "communicate" (as little as liking on Facebook) to a "foreigner" (anyone who either is located on a non-American IP or uses encryption), then FISA can be used to spy on you.

cm2187 11y ago

Faulty intelligence was the scape goat for the war in Iraq. The reality is that the CIA was asked to find reasons to justify a war. And like every good administration it obliged. I think another example where we will observe this sort of forced bias imposed on what should be an impartial community is climate change research. Scientists are asked and given budget to prove that there is a climate change, and that it is man made, and that it will have disastrous consequences. Any study who challenges this is attacked as motivated by financial interests or as conspiracy theorist and is starved of budgets and discredited. And I am sure that we will find that this political pressure will result in completely biased conclusions. And who will be blamed in 20 years for this? The scientific community of course!

pluma 11y ago

> Considering the majority of people say faulty intelligence is to blame for the Iraq war Am I the only one that remembers that the Iraq war was not based on "faulty" intelligence but outright fabrications? This was pointed out at the time and so well-known international politicians quickly backed down from using the US intelligence as justification for the war (going back to handwaving and talking about solidarity).

arethuza 11y ago
Now you can see why Orwell was so keen on exploring the mutability of the past in 1984.

Zigurd 11y ago

"Faulty" intelligence was not the cause of the Iraq war. Our leaders knew they were starting a war of aggression.