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NSA Officers Sometimes Spy On Love Interests
Jah-Wren Ryel writes "The latest twist in the NSA coverage sounds like something out of a dime-store romance novel — NSA agents eavesdropping on their current and former girlfriends. Official categories of spying have included SIGINT (signals intelligence) and HUMINT (human intelligence) and now the NSA has added a new category to the lexicon — LOVEINT — which is surely destined to be a popular hashtag now."
Really is anyone surprised?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Actually it's not that unlikely that your girlfriend/boyfriend might be a terrorist if you work for the NSA. Just think of it, the perfect way to infiltrate the system. If anything this should be mandatory procedure for all NSA employees.
You would make a brilliant bureaucrat/politician. I'm not saying you are one, or even that you have the slightest inclination towards such sleazy behavior, but you certainly understand how they think.
Good point. Probably the only ethical thing about the NSA is that they're an equal opportunity employer.
Spying on love interests is one thing, but spying on innocent children to plan sexually assaulting them is a different category. It's happened before, and I don't understand how people can still defend these monstrous surveillence activities.
Why won't someone think of the children when it's finally appropriate?
Yeah this is exactly why people have a real problem with ubiquitous spy networks. They will inevitably be abused. What happens when the government changes and the new guys don't mind using this apparatus to suppress political dissent? What happens when dissent has been suppressed, the administration becomes the aristocracy and the president effectively becomes king? It's happened before in many places, and the only lesson to take away from all this is that the price of freedom is indeed eternal vigilance.
Most of the incidents, officials said, were self-reported. Such admissions can arise, for example, when an employee takes a polygraph tests as part of a renewal of a security clearance.
Which is exactly what you'd expect if the probability of getting caught is close to zero and the true number of cases is much larger.
And it seems that the boys who work at Ft. Meade may have
been breaking this law.
Of course they are above the law, aren't they ? Time will tell, just
as it did with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Goering, and the rest.
Corrupt is as corrupt does. They've already demonstrated a profound moral bankruptcy and a willingness to collectively serve only themselves, this just a matter of scale.
"Most of the incidents, officials said, were self-reported." So their "significant care to prevent any abuses" consists primarily of "tell us when you've done something bad."
If they actually had strong internal checks in place, the majority of abuses would be detected by those systems, not by self reporting.
I had to do a SIGINT on previous girlfriends too.
Joking aside, it's a well-known fact dating back to well before the roman empire that family is a vulnerability that can be exploited in warfare. The NSA, like any good intelligence agency, keeps track of all exploitable weaknesses in both its own agents as well as the enemy's.
I don't think this is particularly newsworthy -- the problem with the NSA isn't their capabilities, but rather who they're using them on. Very often, it seems the NSA is being run more like the FBI; chasing down the political adversaries of the current majority party, doing DNA analysis on dog shit (true story -- Hoover did it), and investing an inordinate amount of resources in suppressing speech unpopular to the current majority party. The NSA may have once been a first-rate intelligence organization but nowadays they're looking more KGB-ish... overconfident and leaking like a mcdonald's coffee cup during morning rush hour. They really have only themselves to blame for this sorrid state of affairs.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
And if you don't comply when an FBI agent sends you a NSL asking for the medical records of his ex-girlfriend, you also go to jail.
That's not the way background checks for security clearances work. You don't snoop on your own wife/girlfriend/whatever. The agency has people that check out your activities and associates from time to time for any potentially compromising (blackmail potential) situation or connections to foreign intelligence or criminal groups. Other information uncovered is rarely fed back to the employee.
Have gnu, will travel.
Clinton murdered plenty of people in a cruise missile attack in Sudan - US reaction - Yawn.
Clinton had consensual sex with a willing female - US Reaction - Impeach, impeach, impeach.
How Senator Mitch McConnell got his information about Ashley Judd's private medical data for a slander campaign; and not see a corollary of the humanity that is the NSA?
The debate is over what's an effective way to protect our security.
As Bruce Schneier says, you don't find a needle in a haystack by piling on more hay.
Look at some of the articles that were written by real intelligence agents, like the ones who interrogated the Nazis during and after WWII. They all knew German very well. If you're interrogating German officers it's a good idea to know German. Duh.
If you think you're engaged in a war with with Arabic terrorists, it would be a good idea to learn Arabic and Farsi. Before you start tapping every cell phone and Internet connection in the world, it would be a good idea to start by reading their newspapers (rather than depending on MEMRI).
The lazy thing to do is to sit on your ass behind a computer and, if you have an infinite budget, scoop up every electronic communication the world and save it "just in case." Then if you see somebody talking about terrorism, arrest them and keep them in prison forever "just in case." Which is what we're doing.
The smart thing to do (and here I betray myself as a liberal) is to understand your adversary, and find out why they hate you so much and if there's anything you can do about it.
After 9/11, the Wall Street Journal offices, which faced the WTC, were destroyed and they had to put the next day's edition together in an editor's uptown apartment. They spent the next year using their network of reporters (many of whom did speak Arabic and Farsi) interviewing people around the world trying to figure out why they hated us. That's what Daniel Pearl was doing.
One of the themes that kept coming up again was Israel. One Arab businessman was a subscriber to the WSJ. He said, "I like America. I got my MBA in America. But you've got to do something about Israel." For the moderate, westernized Arabs, "doing something about Israel" means stopping the settlements (which is reasonable) and a two-state solution with Israel on the 1967 borders, which Hamas and the Arab League have already agreed to.
The way to protect our country is to do real intelligence, find out what the rest of the world is thinking, and go after the basic causes.