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NSA Head Asks How To Spy Without Collecting Metadata
jfruh writes "NSA Director Keith Alexander, testifying before the Senate this week, got weirdly petulant, asking his critics how he was supposed to do his job without collecting metadata on American communications. 'If we can come up with a better way, we ought to put it on the table and argue our way through it,' he said. 'There is no other way that we know of to connect the dots.' He also implied that major U.S. tech companies might have greater capacities than his organizations, and that they should help him out with new ideas."
Is he doesn't know how to do his job without violating all our rights then he should be replaced.
He means, how can I spy without spying?
You can't.
+----------------- | What is the question!
you obtain the necessary warrant and then perform whatever action is necessary without breaking the law. was that so hard?
So instead of actually doing targeted investigations, you've decided that collecting everything about everybody is the best way to go about it, and if you happen to pick up unrelated stuff for which you had no probable cause, too bad.
Sorry buddy, but just because you can't figure out how to do your job without turning the country (and the entire world) into the worst sort of Big Brother environment is YOUR problem.
And since you've decided that the easiest way to do this is to spy on the whole planet -- fuck you, because the rest of the world hasn't consented to that and doesn't give a shit about the challenges of you doing your job in compliance with the law.
All I'm hearing is "waah, how are we supposed to spy on just some people without effort, warrants, probably cause, and following the law?".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Dammit I don't mind him getting the metadata he actually needs tp defend the United States. What I object to is the idea that he gets ALL the metadata without showing any need for the vast majority of it.
The 4th Amendment was written with the express intent of forbidding general warrants. Yet that's what we have.
Stop it.
This isn't even slightly hard.
Step 1: Require that the companies collect the information and retain it.
Step 2: Get a court order when you need to obtain information about a specific individual, and then obtain only that information.
It's not the metadata that's the problem. It's the fact that you're in possession of it, not just for the people you're legitimately investigating, but for everybody, and the fact that with our legal system being as complex as it is, you can almost certainly find patterns sufficient to suspect any honest person of a crime.
For example, I recently received an email about repairing strings of Christmas lights from someone whose last name is Snowden. Assuming that there's some relation, there's a good chance that my metadata is caught up in one of these f**king dragnets even though I have jack s**t to do with the guy who released confidential info from our government. There's no legitimate reason for them to study me—I'm pretty boring, frankly—but I would not be in the least bit surprised if it happened.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Constitution first. If you can't do what you are trying to justify within the bounds of that very plain-language document, then you DO NOT DO IT.
It would be easy to stamp out all domestic abuse. Just post a federal officer in every couples' bedroom.
Same applies for violent crime with firearms; turn every home upside down and confiscate every firearm you find. If any "missed" or hidden turn up later, immediate death penalty. Possession or use after this point - also immediate death penalty.
It would sure make the cops' jobs easier! We should totally do that! Except it's flagrantly in violation of both the spirit and the word of the Constitution - just like the NSA's metadata dragnets - so too fucking bad.
Do your jobs above board, according to the law. You know, those pesky things you make and ignore, but we serfs have to follow? Those.
So, despite its long and productive pre-history as a Black Chamber and special-ops division during the Cold War -- before the dawn of the Internet -- now the NSA claims that the only way they can do their job is to do things we find to be unacceptable.
Turn. It. Off.
Thanks for making it easy.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
"NSA Director Keith Alexander, testifying before the Senate this week admitted he's not qualified to protect us from terrorism." He said " I have a limited imagination and can only come up with one illegal solution to the problem". This is despite the fact that many terrorist plots have been discovered without violating rights, and his spying solution has failed to stop others. All he has is a hammer so every problem looks like a nail.
The difference between truth and fiction is that fiction has to be plausible.
Why does this have to be such an extreme set of operation? Why has America slipped into this great fear-based society, that must be constantly defended? If this guy's job is so hard, maybe we should start asking why the job is so hard, rather than how to do the job? Because it just may be that there is no answer for this question, it's the question that's the problem.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
The cost of freedom is that you must acknowledge that you must remain vulnerable to attack. Otherwise you destroy the freedom you are supposedly trying to protect.
In this case, that the job exists at all is the problem. That makes the solution simple and elegant. The only remaining issue, is accepting that everytime somthing bad happens, we are necessarilly limited in our ability prevent it.
The government cannot ever make me safe. all they can do is protect my liberties, and over the last 12 years they have been doing a piss-poor job of it.
If his job is to prevent terrorism, he's right... he can't do that without a substantial surveillance dragnet that tramples the 4th Amendment.
He can't do it with that dragnet, either. All this NSA dragnet shit was in place for YEARS at the time of the Boston Marathon bombing, and it wasn't worth shit.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
While we're brainstorming on this, can someone tell me how to shoplift food without stealing it? Until we solve that problem, I'm going to have to continue to break the law to feed my Doritos addiction, but I really don't see any alternative.
Given that the NSA utterly failed to "connect the dots" before Sept. 11, 2001, before the shoe bombing attempt, before the underwear bombing attempt, before the Times Square bombing attempt, before Tim McVeigh and Eric Rudolph and Ted Kaczynski and the Boston Marathon bombers, I would say the illegal methods by which trying to "connect the dots" aren't worth a damn, either. Not for their publicly-stated purpose of foreseeing a future terrorist attack.
If he's talking about "connecting the dots" *after* an attack, then it should be pretty goddamn easy to get a warrant for that investigation.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
How am I supposed to spy if we don't collect data?
The question assumes that spying is needed. This is an unproven assumption. We have no evidence the spying is needed or beneficial, it has been proven only harmful or at best useless.
We're not threatened by other large nations because we have Mutually Assured Nuclear Destruction. Therefore the scaremongers had to invent a new bogieman: Terrorism. The threat is inconsequential. Falling in the bathtub is a greater threat to American lives than terrorism. You're about 4 times more likely to get struck by lightning than die in a terrorist attack. Accidents and Heart Disease kill FOUR HUNDRED TIMES more people EVERY YEAR than a 9/11 scale attack. When you compare the threat of terrorist attack to any other real threat to human lives their scaremongering doesn't match the facts.
Six times more people die from the flu every year than a 9/11 scale attack. We need proportional protection. The budget to protect us from terrorists is out of control. The anti-terrorism budget should be AT MOST one sixth of the budget we spend on ant-flu or 1/200th of the anti-accident budget, 1/200th the anti-heart-disease budget. How much does the government spend to protect citizens from lightning attacks? Is it FOUR TIMES the NSA's budget?!
The government needs no secrets. Our army is big enough and we are powerful enough that we need keep secret nothing. If nothing is secret, you need not fear spies, eh? They've taken the limited power we gave for them to have secrets, and used it against their own people to create a Stasi-like despotic apparatus -- The very thing our soldiers have fought against. Who will answer the call to fight for a government who's action has become indistinguishable from the enemy? The NSA has damaged us, stripped our honor, and shamed us in the world's eyes, our technology sector is suffering due to distrust. The NSA is a threat to national security.
The people should KNOW they can trust their government. We must not allow them to keep secrets. No one has proved the secrets are needed. We are brave enough to risk 400 times the threat of a terrorist attack by driving to McDonald's for a kid's Happy Meal. The public shouldn't have to wear tinfoil hats fearing government spying of citizens unless the government is also handing out lightning insulation suits. We should be able to prove their actions are not harmful to the people or violations of our constitution. We can't do this if there are secret unconstitutional actions.
PRISM is not the first spying apparatus. There was Omnivore, Carnivore, ECHELON, Five-Eyes, and more. Remember how the PATRIOT Act granted immunity to the ISPs retroactively for their assistance in violating the 4th amendment? Yes, remember BEFORE 9/11 how the NSA had secret rooms in telco buildings where all the fiber optics ran through -- Where it was apparently split by mirrors to create PRISM? BEFORE 9/11?!?!!?! OK, NSA. Your fucking move. Prove you are not fucking pointless, you fuckers had your decades of spying on all communications and you FUCKING FAILED to prevent the worst terrorist attack we've ever faced! We even gave you MORE powers and you FAILED again to prevent the Boston Marathon Bombing. The ball is in your court to stand down, the evidence is not in your favor, pushing the issue will get you eliminated for good.
Expensive + Useless = Unnecessary; NSA == Unnecessary.
I'm a scientist, so before we agree to continue funding for these expensive and pointless pork-spending protection systems, including the DHS, I need hard evidence that they are needed. As it stands the facts prove these expenses should be stripped from the budget and given to health care, and research, or at the very least, NASA. The biggest thre
Asking for "a better way to do X" presumes that X should be done to begin with.
"Help us find a better way to torture prisoners!"
Naturally the Senate didn't challenge him on this presumption just as it didn't hold him accountable for lying to them to begin with.
Are gun owners required to be in the militia? Is the State free to draft gun owners?
According to U.S. Federal Law all U.S. able bodied adult males up to a certain age are in the "inactive" Federal Militia. "Inactive" means that there is no requirement to gather or train. Many states have similar laws regarding the state militias. The federal law also makes it clear that the militia is not the National Guard since that upper age limit is increased if a person had ever served in the "active" military forces. The National Guard is an "active" force since it meets and trains regularly and its training is dictated by the U.S. Army.
Automatically being in the Federal Militia is part of the legal basis for the draft. In a technical sense you are being "transferred" from the inactive militia to the active duty reserve (IIRC) force.
Also note that there is an inactive reserve, meaning after you leave the military you no longer have to meet or train but the military still owns your butt for some time frame. They can immediately return you to active duty in the event of a pressing need.
In general the U.S. military has the following components according the federal law (IIRC):
Regular Forces
Active Reserve Forces
Inactive Reserve Forces
National Guard (normally under command of state, can be transferred to federal authority, training dictated by feds)
Active Militia
Inactive Militia (all able bodied males of a certain age range automatically belong)
What a dolt.
You don't own the phone lines, either, or the Postal Service, right? But (landline) phone calls, and (snail-) mailed correspondence are long understood to have First and Fourth Amendment protections.
Is he doesn't know how to do his job without violating all our rights then he should be replaced.
The problem isn't with the mere fact that the NSA is looking for people with bad intentions. That by itself is fine up to a point. The problem is that the NSA and congress and the executive branch refuse to have an adult discussion with the electorate about boundaries and the fact that the NSA presently is not answerable to the electorate. "Trust us" is not remotely sufficient assurance that the NSA is not abusing their power, especially when every indication is that they are behaving badly.
Some surveillance is reasonable and appropriate but there are boundaries beyond which the government should not step without extremely strict oversight. We have the fourth amendment prohibiting unreasonable searches precisely because governments have a hard time restraining themselves. Ensuring judicial oversight is inconvenient for the government and that is precisely the point of that judicial oversight. Governments have proven time and again that they will abuse power. We understand the need for some reasonable surveillance but that doesn't mean we can or should give carte-blanche to the NSA to do whatever the hell they want. The electorate should have a say in exactly what constitutes "reasonable".
In a democracy the government is supposed to be ultimately answerable to the people. When you have a secretive branch of government, implementing secret policies, "overseen" by a secret (and apparently toothless) court, with secret findings that are never released to the public, then there is no way for the NSA to be answerable to the people. THAT is the problem.
Profiling is just another form of indiscriminate metadata.
"Profiling" is a form of rational statistical analysis with a big social problem attached. If you have a known population of people with a propensity to behave in a certain way, then the rational thing to do is to look closely at that population. It is no different analytically than observing that white people are more prone to sunburns and thus have higher rates of skin cancer. If I worked for El Al Airlines security, it would be stupid to not look a little closer at people of Arab descent from a security standpoint because there is a known threat from some portion of that population. It doesn't mean that all Arabs are a threat (most are not) but it does make for a smaller haystack to search through. Profiling by itself is simply a rational form of analysis BUT there is a big problem with using it for policing purposes.
The problem with profiling is that it becomes a cover for overt racism. I know very few black people who have not at some point been harassed by police for no reason other than the color of their skin. Sometimes people do behave in ways that should draw attention from law enforcement but it has to be more than solely the color of one's skin or country of origin.
The director of the NSA openly soliciting for alternative ways to be effective and what does he get?
A pile on of cynical snarky comments.
No, the resounding reaction from Slashdot appears to be "GET A WARRANT", "STOP THE DRAGNET", and to stop the illegal wholesale spying on US citizens. Honestly and truly, that's not snark. I'm being serious here. He wants to do X but X is illegal. TOUGH SHIT.
But you're right. Alternatives are good. How about:
1) Accept some risk. No matter how much you strive for a 1984 panopticon, you'll never catch all the baddies.
2) Stop dicking around in foreign affairs. This doesn't help you directly Mr. Alexander, but you could sure point out that the terrorists that flew planes into the world trade towers were from an organization that was trained by the CIA to fight asymmetrical warfare. And we haven't felt the last repercussions of Iraq yet.
3) REQUEST that ISPs have a streamlined way to accept warrants and divert traffic to the authorities. While I'm against wholesale dragnets, I'm ok with judges giving out warrants where you can prove probable suspicion. For terrorist, all data in connection to the target could be gathered. This is the serious shit here that we pay you for. For other cases of, say, infringing IP law, selective warrants about what data would have to be handled, you know, selectively. And when you have that serious warrant, hell yeah, the ISPs should help you catch the bad guy. But I think that's the FBI's job, not the NSA's...
4) Clarify the position of the NSA as war-time crypto breakers.
You may *think* the NSA is doing what it's doing because it's power mad and seeking fascist control over everyone - and that actually IS a danger , is just as Snowden termed it- "turnkey fascism" but in fact we have no evidence that they've involved themselves in running interference in the mundane affairs of making money and political freedoms excepting where they thought it intersected in national security
That part I actually agree with you. RIGHT NOW, their corruption and abuse of this system has been limited to some minor domestic affairs. But if you give a cop a power and you have little to no oversight to how he uses it, you JUST KNOW that eventually it'll be abused. Come on, learn a little something from history.
Anyone anywhere including malcontents in this nation (the US) could start putting together a doomsday microbe or nanobot or virus
First off, nanobot ANYTHING is still science fiction. Cool field of study, but not quite there yet.
Second, doomsday microbes/viruses? Really? Anyone anywhere could just start doing this? Today? Are you fucking with me? Sure sure, the right people could go cultivate anthrax or make sarin gas, or just a hell of a lot of traditional explosives. But DOOMSDAY devices? This isn't a comic book kid. Rather than boot-stomp everyone who has that capability, how about we treat them with respect and give them a good life so they don't feel like taking us all down in a blaze of glory?
Seriously, this sort of bullshit just kind of entirely negates your entire post. There's simply no need for the sort of radical changes you think we need to go through.