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Officials Say NSA Probed Fewer Than 300 Numbers - Broke Plots In 20 Nations
cold fjord writes "Yet more details about the controversy engulfing the NSA. From CNET: 'Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, explained how the program worked without violating individuals' civil rights. "We take the business records by a court order, and it's just phone numbers — no names, no addresses — put it in a lock box," Rogers told CBS News' "Face The Nation." "And if they get a foreign terrorist overseas that's dialing in to the United Sates, they take that phone number... they plug it into this big pile, if you will, of just phone numbers — it's like a phonebook without any names and any addresses with it — to see if there's a connection, a foreign terrorist connection to the United States." "When a number comes out of that lock box, it's just a phone number — no names, no addresses," he said. "If they think that's relevant to their counterterrorism investigation, they give that to the FBI. Then upon the FBI has to go out and meet all the legal standards to even get whose phone number that is."' From the AP: ' ... programs run by the National Security Agency thwarted potential terrorist plots in the U.S. and more than 20 other countries — and that gathered data is destroyed every five years. Last year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records ... the intelligence officials said in arguing that the programs are far less sweeping than their detractors allege.... both NSA programs are reviewed every 90 days by the secret court authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under the program, the records, showing things like time and length of call, can only be examined for suspected connections to terrorism, they said. The ... program helped the NSA stop a 2009 al-Qaida plot to blow up New York City subways.'"
Plain and simple. If this were at all true then each of these 20 incidences would have been widely touted in the media. They never would have had to give the source of their intelligence or at worst they could have \ would have said that inside information that was actionable was provided to their security forces.
First, the "we broke 20 plots" is bullshit. They have have used these tools in 20 investigations, so what? And what about the other 280 they admit to? And anyway, how many people's data was involved in each of these investigations? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?
In any case, we still come back to the basic problem: The police could certainly stop a few more crimes, if they were allowed unfettered access to people's homes. See someone suspicious? Walk in and search the house, no warrant required. The point is: This price is not worth paying.
Why? For many reasons, but here are the ones that leap immediately to mind:
(1) People need to feel they have personal privacy.
(2) Government bureaucrats are humans: some good, some bad, most just muddling along. Put this kind of power in their hands, and it will be abused. Whether for political ends, to get back at the ex after a nasty divorce, or whatever. Because they work for the government, they will not be punished. See the recent IRS scandals for a perfect example of this.
It is important to limit government power, because this is the only sure way to prevent abuses. You can't abuse power you don't have. If this makes police work a little more difficult, that is a price well worth paying. Convince a judge and get a warrant before spying on someone - this just isn't that hard.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
They didn't do it.
Don't be shy of what you're doing.
Isn't that what they tell us? "If you're doing nothing wrong, then you should have nothing to hide"?
And then they decide that they should probably hide this massive surveillance program? :P
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
The point is not what the NSA has done with the information. The point is what they could do. Having "legally" (I use the term advisedly) obtained all this information on every American, they could now use it for any nefarious purpose. Having done so in secret, they hardly seem trustworthy.
I'm old enough to remember the days when we posted garbage at the end of messages for the "NSA line eater." Time to do that again.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
YOU say that, but the majority of the US, who these officials represent, serve, and are employed by, disagree with you. You can't really expect the government to stop doing these things when so many people support it.
See: http://www.people-press.org/2013/06/10/majority-views-nsa-phone-tracking-as-acceptable-anti-terror-tactic/
The internet can be like an echo chamber, especially in places like Slashdot where a lot of like-minded people come together. With all the outrage that you see, it's easy to be blind to the reality of the situation.
You need to work on changing the minds of the public, then maybe you'll see changes in the government.
There are two schools of thought. Both are valid but it requires a balancing act between the two.
A) Who watches the watchers. If an organization is too secret and has too much power / autonomy then it's a dangerous thing: both to our safety and our liberties.
B) You need to actually be secret and discreet if you want to spy successfully. Face it, there will always be spies and espionage: every country out there does it to some degree. People in surveillance + intelligence + espionage can't "do your job" if you're too far into the sunlight.
USA Politician: Oh, here's a list of personnel and here are the strategies we're using.
Foreign Politician: OK, good to know... we'll work on messing with these people and/or bribing them, and our counter-Intel guys will try to avoid your strategies.
I agree. An old saying, one I believe originated in World War 2 while fighting the Nazis: "The end results do not justify the means used". If the US government breaks the very laws they are responsible to uphold, then it is wrong, regardless of the results. A government that ignores its own laws when they are inconvenient is NOT a democracy and should not expect its citizens to uphold the law any more than they do.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Well, to be fair, telling people what you're doing makes doing it pretty useless when "what you're doing" is covert surveillance.
Hardly. You and I are both well aware that our police regularly do covert surveillance of suspected criminals. The fact that they do so is public knowledge and we are fine with that. While it is sometimes necessary to temporarily hide the tactical details of a specific surveillance, it is not necessary to hide the existence of the program to do so or to hide the findings of such surveillance indefinitely. Furthermore the authorization for such surveillance is overseen by reasonably transparent judicial review, it typically limited in scope and time frame and the results of the surveillance are revealed to the public in due course.
The NSA on the other hand has a system where they have a secret program, with secret directives, overseen by a secret court, whose findings are kept secret. Though many suspected the NSA was conducting surveillance of some sort, the very existence of this program was kept secret from the public. At no point in this system does the public have any means by which to be notified of abuses of this system. The entire progress is treated as a secret and hidden effectively forever from public scrutiny. No reasonable person has a problem with the idea of our government looking for bad guys but the methods used matter greatly and not all methods are acceptable. This is EXACTLY like the end of the movie "A Few Good Men" where the government is screaming at us that we can't handle the truth and that they do not have to explain themselves to us. Cheesy as that sounds, it is a perfect analogy to what is going on here.
This. This is exactly how I almost turned my ultra-conservative, war-hawk, get-the-terrorists-at-any-price to stop defending the program. I just simply said, "what if the democrats had a full-blown, no-secret, Muslim run for president on the idea of diversity and part of their platform is that they would implement Sharia?"
"Well, no raghead would ever get elected."
"His Muslim friends will make cheap oil available and they will run on taxing the rich so that more people get handouts from the government. I mean, democrats already got 47%; how much harder would an additional 4% be with that?"
"Well, we'd rise up against the flagrant violations of the Constitution."
"And now, the administration calls you terrorists and starts monitoring who you call because someone else called you under the same guilt by association theory. And that is what they admit they do, they'd probably bug your phone too."
(dead silence, sound of rusty gears starting to turn again in his head) "Yeah.... They've gone too far. We've got to stop OBAMA. "
(I sigh because I got so close.)
An interesting note to that conversation is how much of that just went unchallenged because Fox News has convinced him that it is actually possible.
Your're right- non religious people do bad things too. They usually need to be a sociopath to do evil things.
You may want to read up on various psychological experiments that how "normal people" can easily end up doing evil things -- even if they are just put in a situation of authority or simply told that a scientific experiment requires them to torture other people.