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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
I had to do a SIGINT on previous girlfriends too.
Don't worry about the government spying on you, it may just be that special someone listening to all your calls.
Good point. Probably the only ethical thing about the NSA is that they're an equal opportunity employer.
So ladies, that boyfriend you have, the one with the steady career in government, who seemed to understand you like no man ever had before...
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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.
No need to worry. US presidents don't lie. Especially not the Nobel Peace prize winning ones. So it's Ok. Because if you can't trust the government... Well then we really are really screwed.
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.
"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.
"administrative action or termination." ...OR termination? Every single one of them should have been fired at the least. If I looked up an ex girlfriend on the electronic medical record system I'm logged into right now, I would be subject to a $50,000 dollar fine and a year in prison even after being fired ( AMA HIPAA penalties page). This kind of abuse of access to privileged information similar to a HIPAA violation, except double illegal since most of the surveillance has no legal basis either.
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.
This isn't a "latest twist in the NSA saga". It's a transparent PR fluff piece.
Obviously the PR division at the NSA figured out a plan to trivialize the revelations. John DeLong at his press conference comes out with "Oh yes, once or twice in the past decade we have broken the rules, but it's been for lighthearded laughable trivial matters like LOVEINT. Ha ha ha, what a joke. My bad. We're all good now, right?"
Of course the media will lap this up. And it distracts attention from the real systematic unconstitutional behavior of the NSA, and the fact that the NSA's overseers themselves believe their oversight to be inadequate.
This is something we should all understand: There's effectively no difference between "actual abuse" and "a system that enables abuse with no accountability". If you have a system that enables abuse without the proper safeguards against abuse, then it's only a matter of time before people start taking advantage of the situation.
Still just a distraction from STOCKINT. Follow the money. The first time I considered such massive surveillance, front-running market events was what came to mind. This is just like anything else in politics. Get people thinking about sex to distract them from the real crimes.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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.
If Obama can arrange to have his dog Bo airlifted to Martha's Vineyard
It isn't like the 2nd helicopter was only for the dog. It was carrying all the personnel and equipment that didn't fit in the first helicopter with the president.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.