Schneier: Break Up the NSA

New submitter BrianPRabbit writes "Bruce Schneier proposes 'breaking up' the NSA. He suggests assigning the targeted hardware/software surveillance of enemy operations to U.S. Cyber Command. Further, the NSA's surveillance of Americans needs to be scaled back and placed under the control of the FBI. Finally, he says, is 'the deliberate sabotaging of security. The primary example we have of this is the NSA's BULLRUN program, which tries to "insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems, IT systems, networks and endpoint communication devices." This is the worst of the NSA's excesses, because it destroys our trust in the Internet, weakens the security all of us rely on and makes us more vulnerable to attackers worldwide. .... [T]he remainder of the NSA needs to be rebalanced so COMSEC (communications security) has priority over SIGINT (signals intelligence). Instead of working to deliberately weaken security for everyone, the NSA should work to improve security for everyone.'"

Comments

Re:Author doesn't understand the NSA

[Electricity Likes Me]

What are you even saying? The whole thing about parallel construction is not that evidence is invented. It's that if you actually committed a crime, then a lot of other evidence which can be reasonably discovered probably exists and its easy to find it - i.e. "this guy probably killed someone and buried him in the woods along the highway, we know from an inadmissable wiretap" - but that means there's still actually a body, and once discovered that is admissable evidence.

You can't be prosecuted from inadmissable evidence, but hohoho, you're also not as good at crime as you think. The alternative to completely eliminating parallel construction and surveillance exchange is a situation where NSA analysts happen across evidence of a crime (like the above example) and then can notify no one at all. Is that really an improvement?

Re:since when is the FBI a spy agency?

[s.petry]

Which is exactly how it's organized. The NSA is spying on overseas comms. When it links to a date/time placed/received call stateside, they hand that information to the FBI, and say, "This phone number in the US is talking to some very bad people overseas." The FBI then starts the investigation.

If this was what was happening, people would not have so many problems with it. If you want to claim it _is_ this way then I expect to see people charged with criminal misconduct currently holding offices and not performing their duties as they should. Here are two words for you to review. "Parallel Construction".

Let's assume that everything is on the up and up, and we have nothing to worry about. The orifices in question are recommending to move to a 3 step system. If you call a store that has an employee that has a friend that called a "questionable" country you are within legal rights for monitoring. This is too vague of a definition, yet people think it will fix something. Play 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon and you quickly see that anyone can be associated with a "terrorist" pretty easily.

Second, calling overseas is not bad. "Overseas" is yet another overly broad term. Do they monitor K-mart officials because they do business? Wow, what a convenient term to use! Now if you shop at K-mart you are within 3 steps! Isn't that incredible? (no, don't answer that rhetorical question)

In a post following this one you claim "it's only metadata". Anyone that believes that metadata is "nothing" (or down plays it's significance) is either repeating propaganda or extremely ignorant. You will find few friends here repeating propaganda or making uneducated claims. You can't play down what it is, when we have studied what this data contains and can be used for. We also see the cases of IRS targeting certain groups which warrants a full open inspection of the system.

I get it, it's hard to believe your own government has become corrupt. The truth is that we have become very corrupt, and until we have open investigations and trials we won't know the extent of corruption. The days of arguing for the innocence of America are long gone (The Gulf of Tonkin is a bitch for that delusion, and just the first of many). The arguments we should be pushing today are how we fix the corruption, and how we open offices for inspection, and how we put criminals that have held (and perhaps are holding) public offices on trial.