Letter to "Extended Family" Assures That NSA Will "Weather This Storm"

An anonymous reader writes "The National Security Agency sent a letter to its employees, affiliates and contractors to reassure them that the NSA is not really an abusive and unchecked spying agency engaged in illegal activity." Whatever you think of the commentary, you can read the original, attached to the linked story.

Comments

And I have a 3 foot long penis

[ameyer17]

Seriously, though, just because you say it doesn't make it true.

Re:And I have a 3 foot long penis

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually a lot of what they do IS illegal, and not really debatable. When the Congress people who voted on the Patriot act and supported its renewal say what the NSA doing isn't allowed in the bill they passed that would be your first indication. The lying to judges to be allowed to continue should be your second clue. Then there is every time Obama or his people come out and say "what you are not seeing is abuse of power by the NSA" and the next day Snowden releases thousands of examples of illegal abueses should be the final nail in showing its illegal.

What you are attempting to do is spin it that this was all perfectly legal started under Bush, because for some reason we shouldn't hold a black man accountable for his actions. What appears to really have happened is the LARGE majority of what has been shown to be illegal has happened in the last 5 years, ignoring Congress and the written laws.

What the NSA letter SHOULD have said is:
The media outlets will continue to call anyone who holds us responsible racist or they will shift the blame to the previous administration to allow us to continune what we are doing uninterrupted. Hopefully we will be able to rig the election so that Hillary wins the next presidency so any calls of what we are doing is illegal will be met with a "War on Women". Because in reality we can't justify what we are doing, all we can do is attack the character of the people pointing it out and about half of our citizens are so fucking stupid they will jump in on our side.

Re:And I have a 3 foot long penis

[Anonymous Coward]

Hitler's minions thought they were okay because they were just doing their job, also.

That didn't help them much when it came time to hand out the war-crimes awards.

Just something the NSA folks might want to think about. They also might want to take a gander at the Constitution and, in particular, the Bill of Rights. Read them all, including Amendment X. Unless they are too stupid to live, comprehending the meaning isn't particularly difficult - assume the words mean what they say they mean, no matter how many corrupt and pompous judges and bureaucrats there are trying to "reinterpret" words to make all the criminality okay.

There may be an accounting, eventually. Eventually may come sooner than later.

Extended Family?

[wjcofkc]

I guess that makes them Big Brother in law.

So, they lie to their own staff, too?

[jcr]

Not surprised. Not surprised at all.

-jcr

When you have to write a letter

[The_Star_Child]

Acknowledging the problem doesn't exist, it most certainly does.

Snowjob

[JustNiz]

>>> It was intended to reassure them that the NSA is not really the abusive and unchecked spying agency engaged in illegal activity that someone reading former NSA contractor Edward Snowdenâ(TM)s disclosures might think...

Uhh what? Snowden just released existing documents, he didn't create them.
It stands to reason that the NSA should be judged exactly by their actions, i.e. the content of the documents they themselves created.

Of course they're not illegal!

[d33tah]

Of course they're not "engaged in illegal activity". They control the law.

I am sure

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sure that the NSA sees itself as the good guy, and I am sure it does serve some useful, protective services. However, if those services come at the expense of civil liberties then the price is too high. And if it comes at a small cost to civil liberty, then it won't be too much longer until the bureaucracy feeds on itself until the small infractions become large ones.

It's not the NSA who will pay the price

[klingens]

Of course the NSA will weather it, will continue to exist and will continue to spy. For them it's a (short) embarrassing time after which the news media will forget them and all will be the same for them again.

The ones who pay for this are the US IT companies which will be distrusted world wide and the US government (politicians, diplomats, secretary of state, etc) who will be distrusted even by their closest allies. US companies will notice it in the long term bottom line e.g. when big foreign companies won't outsource to a US company. The public will forget the scandal soon like they forgot Echelon, the big companies who have actual trade secrets however won't, and if they do they will probably regret it soon when their secrets aren't secret anymore and their US competitors magically know everything they do. These losses are however far in the future: more than a quarter away so they will be denied, at least publically and especially by the ones responsible: the politicians.

The politicians will have a lot less trust and goodwill from their foreign counterparts, even and especially from allied countries.

Spin control

[msobkow]

The NSA denied the spying flat out, until they were caught.

The government claimed the court oversight was adequate, until FOI releases proved they're not.

They said they were only using the surveillance data to catch terrorists, until it was revealed that the DEA was getting a feed.

Why should anyone, even an NSA employee, believe anything these idiots have to say any more?

Re:I don't see how prosecutions can be avoided

[chihowa]

Blackmail only works on criminals and sleazebags. If you're doing shit so bad that you're willing to sell out your entire country to keep it quiet you deserve to be strung up by an angry mob.

Ordinary people do stupid and embarrassing stuff, but most people don't have histories that they couldn't come clean about if forced to. Only sociopathic assholes whose lives are entirely built on deception (eg politicians) are susceptible to this sort of treatment.

Blackmail is like Danegeld. Only an idiot would choose to play that game and only a criminal would need to.