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NSA Director Defends Surveillance To Unsympathetic Black Hat Crowd
Trailrunner7 writes "NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander's keynote today at Black Hat USA 2013 was a tense confessional, an hour-long emotional and sometimes angry ride that shed some new insight into the spy agency's two notorious data collection programs, inspired moments of loud applause in support of the NSA, and likewise, profane heckling that called into question the legality and morality of the agency's practices. Loud voices from the overflowing crowd called out Alexander on his claims that the NSA stands for freedom while at the same time collecting, storing and analyzing telephone business records, metadata and Internet records on Americans. He also denied lying to Congress about the NSA's capabilities and activities in the name of protecting Americans from terrorism in response to such a claim from a member of the audience."
If you read the article it states that General Alexander addressed the legal basis.
The problem isn't always that they answer the questions they wish you had asked, but rather that people prefer to ignore the answers that are given if they aren't the preferred answer. Some people don't want intelligence surveillance to be legal at all, so they ignore the legal basis for doing it and chant about violations of the 4th amendment.
That is before you get to the problem of some people being willing to "defend freedom" to the last drop of blood from their neighbor, or the next city over, just so long as no surveillance passes anywhere near them. All it takes to ethically satisfy them is to chant, 'Die well, my countryman! Die bravely! Make us proud!" So much for the right to life as the basis for the other rights and liberties.
People disregard General Washington's wisdom at their peril.
In a letter to one of his officers written in 1777, Washington wrote that secrecy was key to the success of intelligence activities:
"The necessity of procuring good intelligence is apparent and need not be further urged-All that remains for me to add is, that you keep the whole matter as secret as possible. For upon Secrecy, success depends in most Enterprises of the kind, & for want of it, they are generally defeated, however, well planned...." [letter to Colonel Elias Dayton, 26 July 1777]
For some mind numbingly stupid reason people keep wanting to reveal US intelligence operations to all, citizen or noncitizen alike. That isn't likely to end well. There is no putting the genie back into the bottle once it has escaped. You generally have to find a new genie, and that can take years, or decades.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
.... for the crime of causing the Surveillance State a little trouble.
NSA chief says leak damage 'irresponsible and irreversible'
National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander said Thursday the damage from recently leaked information is "irresponsible and irreversible" because it has given terrorist groups the intelligence community's "playbook."
Snowden leaks give edge to U.S. rivals, officials say
Among the disclosures from Snowden that were published in the Washington Post and the Guardian was that Skype, the Internet calling service, was among the systems that provided data to the NSA's secret PRISM database. That disclosure contradicted a widespread belief that calls made via Skype were difficult or impossible to intercept.
Some suspected terrorists the NSA was tracking are no longer using Skype, U.S. officials said. Others have stopped using email, said one U.S. official who has been briefed on the damage.
"The Skype thing was really bad," the official said.
You don't think you're downplaying this just a little, do you?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell